Hi friends 👋,

I'm participating in the #100DaysOfOSS challenge by OpenSauced. Inspired by the #100DaysOfCode challenge, #100DaysOfOSS is a challenge for everyone interested in open source to learn about open source, contribute, or maintain open source projects over 100 days, starting on July 23rd.

This challenge focuses on growth. So it's about more than just contributing code. You can learn about open source by reading or watching tutorials, engaging in the community by sharing information and knowledge, or any other ways you find comfortable and doable. You can read more about how you can participate here.

One of the things worth noting is that this challenge is supposed to be fun. So, taking days off when you need it is okay.

🎯 Goals

Before starting the challenge, we must set goals that we want to achieve within 100 days.

I aim to learn more about open source and improve my ability to contribute to open source projects and support the community. And I want to push myself out of my comfort zone by answering questions or mentoring beginners in open source.

I want to accomplish these in 100 days:

📚 Learning

• Learn how to find issues — especially documentation and accessibility — on GitHub.

• Learn to spot issue(s) in repositories and write good issue(s).

• Learn to write a better pull request.

• Learn more about git commands.

• Learn about GitHub Action.

✨ Action

• Contribute to open source projects. I don't set any goals on how many projects, but I want to contribute to various open source projects.

• Collaborate with other contributors and maintainers in contributing to open source.

• Be more active in open source communities, such as through social media, Discord, Slack, etc.

🤝 Support

• Support beginners in open source.

  • Write blog posts about open source.
  • Do mentoring.
  • Update documentation to make them beginner friendly.

• Support open source content creators.

  • Attend Twitter spaces, streams, etc.
  • Read and give feedback on blog posts around open source.
  • Promote their creation on social media.

• Support the community.

  • Answer questions around open source topics.
  • Give likes and comments on posts about open source on social media and blog posts to motivate others.

You can follow my #100DaysOfOSS daily progress in my journal below.

✅ Recap: Day 1-14

Learning and Supports

There were days when I didn't have much time or motivation to explore open source projects. I used these times to learn and support the community.

• I wanted to use a table in one of my repo's README. So I learned to create a table in Markdown.

• I contributed to repositories that use issue and pull request templates, and I wanted to learn how to create one. So I learned how to make the templates and implemented them on my #100DaysOfOSS journal repository.

• I attended two Twitter spaces with open source topics. One was hosted by OpenSauced and the other by YK aka CS Dojo.

• I read some open source blog posts on DEV. I highly recommended the posts by BekahHW, OpenSauced, and Pradumna Saraf.

• I read about GitHub Action and still confuse 😅.

Contributions

Because we're on vacation, I thought I wouldn't have time to contribute to open source. But then, I could find half to one hour in the morning when my family was still asleep.

• I created four issues and pull requests to update various docs at Virtual Coffee repositories.

• I made an issue to ask for a dashboard feature at OpenSauced's repository.

• I created an issue and a pull request to update the docs to be more beginners friendly for the #100DaysOfOSS journal template at OpenSauced's repository.

Challenges

In general, my biggest challenges are time and internet connection. My kid has school's summer holiday, and we're on vacation for a few weeks. And the internet connection here is not at its best 😅.

Well, maybe I need to enjoy our vacation more 😄.

Wins

All of my pull requests for Virtual Coffee got merged! 🥳

Final Thoughts

One of the valuable lessons I've learned during these 14 days is that we can learn so much from raising an issue.

I only had experience raising issues with a concrete solution in mind before participating in this challenge. But I learned it's okay to raise an issue you encountered without proposing a concrete solution as long as you can explain it. And I learned so much by following and observing the maintainers and other contributors' communication in approaching a problem and walking through solutions.

If you're doing #100DaysOfOSS, how was your experience? Do share it with us in the comment below 😄!

🖼️ Credit cover image: unDraw

Thank you for reading! Last, you can find me on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky. Let's connect! 😊