First Contribution to an Open-Source Project

Context

Participated in a 4-week long micro-internship where a random partner and I would contribute to an open-source project (with the help of a mentor), hosted by CodeDay.

The initial issue that I was tasked with had a weird occurrence, so I was tasked with a different/easier solution but with only 2-weeks worth of time.

The Open-Source Project

I was tasked with working on the open-source project, Next.js.

Now, what is Next.js? To quote the website itself, "Next.js is a flexible React framework that gives you building blocks to create fast web applications." Next.js controls all the requirements for React while also providing additional features, structure, and optimization.

With this framework, we have websites like Twitch, Hulu, DoorDash, and more.

The Issue?

To see the actual issue, refer to this Github issue. Now in my own words, the issue I was tasked with was to add some documentation relating to using a certain function to render error pages in an error handler when using custom servers.

Understanding the Issue

The act of typing down information seems very simple. In my case, however, I had no idea what NextJS was or even used it. So my first step was to learn some of the important/basic concepts of NextJS. I even took an additional step to learn a bit about how React works since NextJS uses React as well. This is a good watchlist I referred to when learning NextJS. Here is also the documentation page which I used to research more about NextJS. When it came to doing research, I simply wasn't learning everything about NextJS but rather topics that would help me understand the issue. In addition, I thought about trying to implement an example so that I would have a better understanding of the issue.

Requesting for Backup

After doing some research and learning more about NextJS, I still had no idea what I should be typing down as documentation for the issue. I didn't even know where to start when it came to implementing an example. This was where I took the initiative to contact the author of the Github issue and see if he can answer some of my questions, give me tips on where to look, and how to implement what he wanted to be documented.

Documenting Time

Now I was not able to implement a working example, but I did have some understanding which was better than having nothing. With that said, a pull request was made and this was the documentation that I created.

That's It?

Technically, yes. On the other hand, the documentation I created definitely can be improved even more. Despite the micro-internship session ending, this does not mean an end to my contributions to open-source projects. I wouldn't be surprised to see myself doing more stuff like this in the future.

Big thanks to Stef, the author of the Github issue I was tasked with. Without my decision to contact him, I believe I wouldn't have been able to make any progress at all.