Tinker then Contribute to Open Source
Open source contributions need not be great achievements. Actually, most of them are not, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In this paradigm, projects get better simply by being public and having people with different levels of expertise and involvement contribute to them. I recently contributed to a project that has allowed me to learn a good amount about networking. My contribution was eight lines of code. I admit that even if networking is something I already have some experience with and have been expanding my skills in recently, I don’t claim to be well versed in that specific project. Also, coming from a science background, I am fluent in Python and C++, and can understand, but not write much, Go (yet 😉). But I think that’s exactly the whole point of an open source contribution: we don’t need to be experts or hardcore programmers in the language a project is written in if we want to contribute. What we do need is the willingness to contribute, a problem to solve (or a feature to add), and the systems thinking needed to integrate it without breaking anything else (your PR won’t be merged otherwise anyway). This is even more true with the help of AI coding agents. ...