My first contribution to a GitHub project was finally merged to the master branch today! It was just a bug fix but it’s a start!!

!rant
What I really like about all these growing startups/platforms like airbnb, netflix etc, is that they open source their cool technologies so that anybody can use them. If you look through their github repos, you can find a lot of cool and interesting stuff and especially it's mostly already battle tested and it works.

Imo this is some really big contribution in turn to the money they make :)

I tried to contact 3 developers of restify (famous node js package) to tell them about my library anumargak (node js based router). I received the response from one guy finally who talked to other developers when I explained the advantages of switching to this new router.

They all were happy to switch and asked me to do necessary changes and raise a PR. I did it and then they stopped responding.

Today is the day I contributed to the open source software for the first time.
It may not be a big thing for someone but for me it is.

Yay! I still don't get how I did this lol
Time to practice some more! (If you've got any good tutorials or projects let me know! I need the practice lol)

Any good open source NodeJs projects that are easy to start contributing to?

Currently there are 1273 plugins awaiting review after submission to WordPress plugin server. Nearly as much as the 1345 open "type: bug" issues in WordPress/gutenberg on GitHub. Reminds me of "Suggested edit queue is full" on StackOverflow. Either too many people contribute to open source, or too little seniors willing and able to review, or our workflows don't work well enough. But good to see that there is still stuff going on in communities and not everyone just playing around with AI tools or uploading social media content all the time.

I submitted my first pull request 2 days ago and guess what maintainer closed the issue without accepting and merging my request even 1 day ago I have commented on the issue comment box that I have a pull request please accept.

Not feeling good, I was thinking the hardest task is to find an issue we can contribute to, but the hardest task is, which we can't have control in and that is merging the pull request.

OpenSource is fun they said. I being a bored teen thought, ah, another chance to experiment. Discover something new. Now I am into piracy, movies, music, software. If I can get it for free I ain't paying for it. So I went on to GitHub to see what exciting new Repos I could contribute to. I hate already implemented plenty of algorithms in GO for GitHub.com/TheAlgorithms so I was looking something more practical, more beneficial to society. Then I saw it, the perfect repo, not too complex and not amateur. SpotDL/spotify-downloader for downloading songs from Spotify, a grey area coz it's technically piracy. Well not from Spotify, we fetch the info from the Spotify API and search for the songs on YouTubeMusic. They were just about to release v3, a complete rewrite of the codebase stressing code readability and stuff. I spend about a day studying the codebase, trying to findout just where I could make my contribution. I can see outright that there's a huge problem with implementation.

First of all the script spawns 4 processes for downloading songs though you might be downloading only one song. Which means for everytime you run the script you have to wait for 4 other processes to be spawned before any downloading can happen. Sure this is faster when you are downloading more than like 4 songs, but it's actually slower when downloading a single song. But I ignored that coz I assumed that most users download playlists and albums. Anyway we talked with the like lead developer and he was all like, make those PRs anytime you feel like. So I made a really minor first contribution.

I introduced download from Spotify URI functionality, modified like 10 lines of code. I was half expecting that the PR would be merged within hours at most 24 hours coz of how minor of a contribution it was, 5 days in it was pending. So I tagged the lead Dev and he was all appreciative of the PR, calling it real 'clean code' and stuff. 3 more days, the PR is still not merged. I have now stacked 4 more commits to the same PR, I tag the dev and he's like he's waiting to see if my 'feature' will get atleast 10 upvotes so that it can be merged, he links an issue. I go to the issue and my feature is not there, So 11 days after I made my PR I have to write a comment explaining the 'feature' introduced in my PR and then wait for 10 upvotes.

I was like f**k this, I'll just develop on my fork if you want the features on my fork, you will make your own PR! I am so done with OpenSource, development is slow. I have no idea how you guys do it. I can't handle development where I don't have write access.