The day before yesterday I submitted my first PR, it was accepted, and I’m pretty happy about that.
This PR was more about form than substance. The project documentation was a bit outdated and there was a small part that needed to be updated. I got tripped up by it a bit during deployment.
I also had some thoughts during a brief exchange with the maintainer.
I’ve never had much confidence in my English expression, mainly because I don’t have much experience. I feel especially insecure about word choice, phrasing, and slang in conversations, and I worry that I might accidentally come across as impolite. In this exchange, I was very stiff, like an emotionless translation machine. But I really don’t know how to strike the right balance between being relaxed, humorous, and polite. I’ve decided I really do need to learn these things when I get the chance.
On being rigorous. This time I only changed one line in the documentation, so I didn’t think it through carefully enough. Given the limits of my current knowledge and technical ability, I assumed it was fine, but in reality that was just taking things for granted. The maintainer’s question left me a bit stunned. There’s no shortcut here; I really need to keep building solid technical skills.
I have a lot of respect for the maintainer. He was probably using his spare time to communicate with a newbie like me. It was a very small change; if the developer had done it themselves, the whole thing might have taken a minute. Instead, he stretched six short messages across time zones over three days to talk it through with me. For a decision of mine that didn’t have much solid reasoning (given my technical level), I personally feel he made the situation quite clear: the issue was in my understanding. Yet his wording was full of humility; he didn’t point it out directly, but instead asked for my reasoning and whether I had actually run into the problem, and then ended by saying thanks.
I’ve always been very drawn to the open source world. But for a self-taught programmer, it really isn’t easy. Even though I spent my graduate years doing engineering work, my coding skills, theoretical foundation, and CS fundamentals are all still quite weak. I hope my skills can accumulate to the point where contributing to projects I like feels easy. This small step is a big step for me.
