I'm going to say it, I never thought I would be able to contribute to Open Source. It felt like this vast sea of projects was not meant to be open. At least not for me. Not with the experience or knowledge I could contribute.
And that, friends, is exactly why I kept on looking for ways to contribute. I mean, if I can land my dream job, code daily, and contribute to other developers' projects, I can contribute to Open Source. It's as if I had done it all this time, just not that "open" and "free", right? So here I am. Searching for a way to do it, this is it, I repeat to myself, I am going to do it.
Aaaaaand I didn't even know what I was looking for. Every time I looked at someone else's project, it felt overwhelming, like "Damn, I should be able to do this already", or "TypeScript is my way to go". I kept founding setbacks, and I kept finding ways to improve. But none of that helped me to contribute to Open Source. At least not until I found something I care so much about.
Themes ✨
Yep, you might be right, this can be an unnecessary project, I mean, you don't "need" a theme to code better or faster, but it's something I've always taken the time to set up. Like, I couldn't work on my machine until everything was in dark mode. Or how my way to make friends on Platzi Master was by sharing theme recommendations. And the list only goes on and on. Setting and icon pack and wallpaper to match the theme I'm currently on until I found a way to make it all work together. I know you know where this is going, and that was my way in. Just embrace that thing that you care the most about, it doesn't have to be super complex or even something you completely and utterly love. It just needs to be something you can relate to and that you want to spend some time on improving. And that's what I'm going to do.
At this very moment, I'm writing this, I'm halfway through my PR to add this implementation to the theme's repo. And I constantly feel like I'm missing something or that someone else is going to chime in and beat me with a better way to do it. But even though I might not be the very best at it, I'm going to try. And that's all I know for now. Will keep you posted.
Edit on 2022-04-08: Kind of panicked when I couldn't find a repo to ask for a PR. Even wrote them a tweet asking for some guidance.
Glad to say I did it. Probably minutes away from receiving a direct link to the repo I was looking for.
Now, I'm happy to share that my first ever contribution to Open Source was the theme I use daily on almost every piece of software. And even happier to say that, even in more apps thanks to my contribution.
Check out Rosé Pine's theme if you want to try it out.
Here's my contribution for JSON Viewer: GitHub's repo.