Overall it was an alright experience, finding projects to work on that had stuff that was easy to do and still interesting was definitely the hardest part about this whole experience. Majority of my PR were fairly simple so it all went well with the exception of one of my PR, I failed one of the automated tests when submitting my PR and wasn’t sure whether it was the tests fault or my fault. I left a comment on my PR about it but have yet to get a response from the maintainer. Which brings me to what I would do differently which is to not bother with projects that seem dead. What I would also do differently next time is to work on stuff that I am familiar with and don’t bother trying to learn anything new.
Contributing to open source projects is also a good way to learn how to write good code because while looking for stuff to work on you will inevitably have to read a bunch of code. And according to Stephen King to be a writer you must read a lot and write a lot and I think this applies to programming as well. To be a programmer you must write a lot of code and read a lot of code.
Hopefully in Release 0.3 we are forced to work on bigger bugs because I can’t work without an incentive.
Here is the list of PR’s I did for Release 0.2:
Alvin's Blog 