My First Open Source Contribution

It’s always great to face that fear and then realize it was nothing to fear.

Imposter Syndrome

So, last year, I embarked on a journey to become a better Javascript developer. I’ve been working professionally since September 2018, and I feel like I’m not maximizing my developer experience—i.e., Imposter Syndrome—my brain yells at me that I’m not doing what all the cool developers are doing, so I must be doing something wrong.

Please don’t take this as I’m being hard on myself. I find it comedic how insane my thoughts can make me feel, but when saying them aloud, I realize they’re not grounded in reality.

Anywho, with five years of experience, I felt like I should’ve been doing more, but I didn’t know what that should be. It’s funny because I was always searching for what I could do or trying to get hands-on experience in a project I had no interest in. I always lost interest quickly because I was trying to force the contribution. This brings me to the point where I made my first contribution.

At this time, I felt like I might’ve been falling behind where I wanted to be as a developer. I wanted to be a senior, so as I already mentioned, I wanted to hone my skills as a JS dev. At this time, I was learning using ui.dev, and I wanted to touch all the JS things because I needed to practice what I had learned.

My First Contribution

I like a project called Resumake that allows you to use a JSON resume template to generate your resume. I’ll spare you the details as that is potential blog material. I tried to remake it in Javascript because I wanted some features it didn’t have, and I also didn’t want to context switch to understand its tech stack. As I’m working on this project, one of the biggest roadblocks was how to render a PDF-like view as the user is updating their JSON resume or has imported an existing JSON resume; insert react-pdf.

React-pdf had everything I needed to continue, but as I continued working, I noticed an issue with the size of the PDF that was being generated. It was not being correctly resized when the webpage viewport would resize.

Here’s the part that makes me most excited about this contribution. I haven’t had a chance to work with HTML canvases in my career. Everything had been very data-driven or user-driven, but nothing needed to generate graphics. Also, this project wasn’t mission-critical, i.e., my job didn’t require me to do it. This is usually how most of my projects fall by the wayside and never get completed. So, creating a PR with a fix and seeing it through excites me the most about this contribution, and then it’s followed by me never having worked in this area before, and being able to successfully put my fix in front of the world for criticism was just mind-blowing for me. Early in my career, I suffered from a crazy amount of imposter syndrome. I would cringe whenever someone needed to review my code, so making a PR that would be reviewed by folks who weren’t my coworkers was an accomplishment.

After opening the PR, I continued with life, the project lost momentum, and I forgot about the contribution. Six months later, I got an email saying my PR had merged, which sparked my excitement again. My PR not only fixed an issue I was having; it was also an open issue in the repo.

Lessons Learned

It’s always great to face that fear and then realize it was nothing to fear. I won’t be trying to force another contribution, but if I find one I can fix, you better believe I’ll be making another contribution.

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Checkout my PR: https://github.com/mikecousins/react-pdf-js/pull/419