💭 what is contributhon?

Contributhon (organized by She Code Africa) is a 2-month (cohort-style) open source bootcamp designed to pair mentors from different global open source organizations, with African women in tech who get to work with them on selected projects within the organization. The program aims at giving us the opportunity to contribute to open source and understand what working within a community is about, with guidance from mentors. Before Contributhon, I had never contributed to open-source. A month before I applied to be a part of Contributhon, I attended OSCAFest (a 3-day open-source conference held in Lagos in March, organized by Open Source Africa). I was very inspired by talks from various open-source contributors, maintainers etc and their stories of how contributing to open-source had helped them become better developers and writers. This led to my determination to be a part of Contributhon 2022.

💡 what did i do?

I was assigned to FLINT.Cloud project under mojaglobal for the duration of the program. Mojaglobal is an organization committed to fighting climate change through nature-based solutions. The Full Lands Integration Tool (FLINT) is a platform for estimating greenhouse gas emissions at local, national and global scales. The FLINT.Cloud project aims to build a cloud deployment framework for rapid deployment of FLINT implementations.

Under the guidance of my mentors, as well as She Code Africa's Program Managers and POC's, I was able to make my first open-source contribution to FLINT. Cloud. I was assigned to this issue :

I was a bit unsure of how to go about it at first, but I was able to go over it in-depth with my mentor (Harsh Mishra) and he advised that I turn all the various CORS origins into env variables and store them in a .env file. I then created an env.template file to give future contributors a template of what they would need to include in their own .env files. I also had to install the python-decouple module to give the application access to the variables. My PR is currently under review and should hopefully be merged soon.

I picked up a second issue regarding writing tests in FLINT.Cloud and intend to continue working on it even though Contributhon has come to an end.

🔀 challenges faced

I would definitely say that my biggest challenges were in regards to Git workflow. I initially had some merge conflicts when trying to merge, merging to the wrong branch etc. I was even a bit worried about messing up the project's codebase but thankfully that wasn't the case. I'm also a very shy person by nature so communication was one of my challenges in the beginning. But Open-Source is all about community and I realized that once I actually started reaching out and discovered how helpful everyone was. The SCA Program Managers were also always willing to lend a helping hand/ear regarding any issues we were facing.

⛅ what did i learn?

Honestly there were a lot of things to be learnt from participating in Contributhon, but the most important ones are:

• The value of community in open-source (and the amount of effort and dedication put into it by maintainers, contributors, etc)
• The contributing workflow i.e how to submit a pull request, cloning the repository, forking the stable branch, and committing changes.
• Proper contribution practices such as: updating documentation, signing-off commit messages, fetching most recent version of the branch before trying to make changes, etc.

📁 improvement suggestions

The only improvement suggestion I would make for the upcoming cohort would be the provision for a more direct line of communication. In particular, one that includes the mentees, their mentors as well as the SCA POC's, in order to facilitate more open conversation and guidance.

📈 next steps

As I mentioned earlier, I intend to continue contributing to FLINT.Cloud after the program. I also aim to continue my journey into open-source by contributing to many more open-source projects/programs. We also learned about similar open-source programs to Contributhon, such as Outreachy, and I plan to apply in the upcoming cycle. Many thanks once again to the Contributhon Sponsors, She Code Africa, and the various open source organizations that participated.