Contributing to Open Source Projects

I was never an ideas guy. I figured that out when years ago and I'm happy to be given tasks and completing them. It could be very broad task like "create a website for our company that will send birds into the darkest depths of the ocean" and I'll figure out everything in between and the website will be done. Rather than think of some cool project for myself, which I'm struggling with, I spent my time finding an open-source project that I can contribute to. This gives me the opportunity to work on big projects like companies I'm applying to rather than one-off websites that I have created.

Technically, I didn't find the project myself. I asked Reddit for open-source projects and browsed through the ones they suggested. I ended up with Cal.com because it's basically like Calendly so I'm sure people will be using it.

I made my first contribution a week ago. The task wasn't complicated and it was more of a chore than actually writing any code; I had to removed any unused declared variables. It gave me an opportunity to poke around in the code and see how everything works since I had to comb through it and find the variables to delete.

I'm still looking through the code and figuring out how everything works. I already found the next ticket I'm working on which involves showing users time in their timezone so I'm really looking forward to that.