A new step as an open source project maintainer
I've been working visibly on open source projects for a few years now.
I started while I was doing my undergrad, participating in the Hacktoberfest in 2019. From there, I moved to contributing a couple of minor changes to random projects I found on the internet. At the same time, I worked on my undergrad thesis openly on a public Github repository, as well as on other big projects on my final year.
One of my favorite moments (so far) was when I contributed my first (and, so far, only) commit to the mybb repository, a piece of software with a special place in my heart, especially during my teenage years. It wasn't a big change, just a missing >, but it was another symbolic step for me: being able to give something back to a community that I held dear.
I then moved onto creating my own projects. A lot of them didn't go beyond a couple commits made in an afternoon or two, and have been left behind. For others, however, I've dedicated more time: a program to send public domain books to a Kindle via email, an assistant to find outdated packages in Python projects, a bot that sends dog pictures in Telegram chats... In general, a variety of projects that, for the most part, arose to cover at least one of the following needs:
- Learning how to use a new tool, or
- Solving a personal need
For these reasons, and although in recent years I've put the same effort into my personal projects as I have into my professional ones (unit testing, changelogs, continuous validation, documentation, clean code...), all of them have been a sort of bottle to the sea: the exercise of solving my own problems in the open, with the idea that at some point someone else might find it useful.
And a couple of weeks ago, that day came.
I received my first feature request! #
The other day, a user on Github opened an issue in the barkr repository, my cross-posting tool for social media, with a request: to add support for Discord.
It's the first time I receive a request of this kind, which makes me think the following:
- I finally did something that is useful to someone else!
- And not only is it useful to them in its current state, but also in its future state (to the point of taking the time to write to ask for a change)
This is most probably an insignificant thing in the grand scheme of things, but added to the fact that the number of stars on the Github project has gone up (and by this I mean: it's not 0), it made my day, my week, my month, and reinforced my motivation to keep working on barkr, improving it little by little, not just for myself but also (maybe) for someone else.
How nice it is to do open source! :-)
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