There's something about endings that make you sit back and actually look at how far you've come.
The contribution period closes tomorrow and I find myself doing exactly that. Looking back at where I started, a Windows user who had never touched open source, never submitted a pull request, never been part of a community like this, and looking at where I am now. It feels good. Really good.
Where It All Started
I wrote about my first few days in my last blog post. The confusion, the tabs, the channels, not knowing where to look or who to talk to. What I didn't write about was what came after that, the part where things got hard in a different way.
Getting Fedora Badges running on my Windows machine was genuinely one of the most challenging things I did during this period. The setup instructions and guides are mostly Linux focused, and the mentors were clear from the very beginning that Linux is the requirement for this project. I was working against the grain and I knew it. There were moments where I genuinely didn't know if I'd get it working.
But when it finally ran on my system, when I saw the badges application live in my browser after all of that, I remember just sitting there for a second. That felt like an achievement. Not a small one either.
The Contributions
My first two PRs were removing legacy CSS and JS files that were tied to the old Jinja2 templates and had no connection to the new React frontend. Simple in concept but not without lessons.
I initially targeted the wrong branch. So I had to go back, redo them correctly on swatantrya and resubmit. Then came the signing issue. I thought I had signed my commits correctly but the mentor pointed out that the Signed-off-by line wasn't actually showing in the commit message. I tried amending but didn't do it quite right. It took some back and forth before I understood exactly what git commit -s does and how to use it properly. That small thing taught me more about git hygiene than anything I'd read before.
Both PRs eventually got merged. So did a third one. Three merged pull requests. When I look at my GitHub profile now I can see my first pull request, my first merged contribution, my first good issue label. Firsts are always special and these ones I'm going to remember.
I also have one PR still open and under review which I'm hoping lands soon.
Reviewing Someone Else's Work
One thing I didn't expect to do during this period was review another contributor's PR. The mentors encouraged everyone to step forward and review each other's work and I took that seriously.
It was my first time reviewing code in an open source project. Looking at someone else's contribution, understanding what they did, thinking about whether it made sense, that's a completely different skill from writing code yourself. It made me more careful about my own work too.
What the Mentors Gave Us
The mentors here are genuinely experienced and it shows in everything they share. From how to think about AI tooling, to how open source communities work, to what good contributions actually look like. None of it felt like rules being handed down. It felt like people who had been through this for years sharing what actually matters.
The dictionary and book analogy about AI stuck with me. You can use it to understand, but the work has to be yours. Simple but it reframes everything.
[ Mentors Akashdeep Dhar (gridhead) and Shounak Dey. You can find them on GitHub. ]
How It Feels
Productive. That's the word that keeps coming back to me.
Not just in a "I got things done" way but in a deeper sense, like I was spending my time on something that actually mattered. Being around people who care about what they're building, who give honest feedback, who encourage you to try things you haven't tried before, that's rare.
This is my first open source experience. My first real pull request. My first contribution that lives in a real codebase that real people use. Fedora Badges is going to be the thing I point to when someone asks me where I started.
And honestly, for a first, I couldn't have asked for better.
One thing worth mentioning is that even though the official contribution period is closing, Outreachy allows contributions to be recorded until April 30th. And honestly I don't see myself stopping anyway. I've already started looking into a small feature update and plan to keep contributing. Not because I have to but because I'm genuinely invested in seeing this project move forward now. Once you care about something it's hard to just switch that off.
Whatever comes next, I'm glad I showed up.
