Digital Bacon Documentation
For my contribution, I decided to help the documentation on a project called Digital Bacon. I decided to do this becuase it was a good, small thing that I could help out with, without needing a ton of experience, nor needing to commit a lot of my time to it.
Introduction to the Community
Digital Bacon describes itself as a “Content Management System for 3D Websites.” I picked this project because it was something I had never heard of and it interested me. My experience looking through open source communities during the Comm Arch assignments helped me determine this project, although not the best, would most likely be a fine choice for this project. Althought there were not many contributors, they did not have many major red flags. They had their documents in order and had decent activity at the time I found it. They had a readme, a license, a code of conduct, a contributing doc, as well as docs for funding, security, and drafting issues and releases.
The Issue
I found this issue and project when I searched on Good First Issues, which was provided by Elizabeth Barron and her presentation to our class about CHAOSS. The issue I found was for adding documentation to the CONTRIBUTING.md doc. Specifically, the issue wanted there to be a message about how to use the lint command and the test command, so new users would know that they exist and to use them.
When I found this issue, I commented on it asking if I could contribute to this.
The creator of the repo responded very quickly saying yes I could!
An issue (haha) I ran into was that once I had gotten the issue assigned to me, and put it in our class’s doc for who is doing what, I put this assignment on the backburner to focus on other assignments and projects that were due sooner. On the very day I set aside to work on this assignment and do the bugfix, the owner of the repo unassigned it from me due to inactivity, and advertised it as up for grabs to others (who did not jump on it).
After seeing this, I sent a message apologizing and explaining, as well as sending my draft of what I was going to add. They accepted this and asked me to officialize it in a pull request!
I really appreciate how flexible they were here. When I saw the notification that I had been removed, I was honestly very anxious I would have to find a new issue and start all over again. Their response was really relieving to see, and I really appreciate them letting me continue.
After this message, I created a new branch of the project to add my changes. After I added them, I then commited to my branch.
After committing, I submitted my pull request and made sure to mention the issue, as requested for pull requests to do in the very doc I was editing haha.
To which the developer quickly responded, thanking me and asked if I would like to be added as a contributor! I responded sure, I’d appreciate that!
Conclusion
This was my first time contributing to any kind of open source project, ever. This was a cool experience and an opportunity I was honestly more scared of than I should have been. Seeing how easy it is to do contributions like this has definitley made me more open to doing them in the future.