As a beginner in contributing to open source, you might not be sure of how to start contributing. I want to tell you about a contribution I have made to an open source project I used.

Often I explain to people who want to start contributing, that they can look into projects they already use. This is what I did when I contributed to scala-exercises.org website content.

Identifying a potential contribution

I was working through FP IN SCALA exercises, from “Functional Programming in Scala” book, in particular, I was doing the Property Based Testing section.

I noticed there was a typo where the syntax…

Often when making changes to code, I commit them and then have to change to commit I just made, either because I think the commit message could be better or I had to make a last-minute change to the code I wish to include in the commit.

Change last commit message

So consider I committed changes with the following command (-m to write one line commit message):

git commit -m "fix: big feature X"

Here’s how I fix the commit, using the --amend option.

git commit --amend -m "fix: small feature X"

In case I want to add additional code to the commit, I…

Um projecto Open Source costuma ter uma base de ficheiros, que permite colaboradores perceber como devem interagir com o projecto e quais as expectativas de quem mantém o projecto (maintainer). Estes são os ficheiros base que projetos open source costumam ter.

Licença

A Licença de um projeto open source é importante para os colaboradores saberem em que condições podem usar o projeto. No que diz respeito ao tipo de licença que se deve escolher, isso depende do projeto. Eu sei que há umas licenças mais permissivas que outras. …

I got into university, Instituto Superior Tecnico in TagusPark, to pursue Communications Networks degree (now called Telecommunications and Informatics Engineering) without knowing anything about programming. The first programming course I had was the Programming Foundations course, in which in the first classes I found myself a bit lost. In this course, we were thought how to code through Python. So this was the first programming language I learned!

In one of the programming labs, I did an exercise which I thought I performed poorly. …

For a long time, I thought about contributing to Open Source, but I felt I did not know where to start. As a software engineer, I wanted to learn and build a portfolio of work through contributing to Open Source.

Back in December 2017, I got the word of 24 Pull Requests, an initiative with a Christmas feel to it, where you can contribute to open source projects during the month of December.

At AnitaB.org Open Source we have a project called Mentorship System, which I started during Google Summer of Code 2018. This project is composed of several repositories: flutter, android, ios, and a backend written in Python (Flask).

I want to describe how I deployed the backend REST API project on Heroku, using its free tier.

Setup project to be deployable on Heroku ⚒️

So anitab-org/mentorship-backend already could be run locally using simply python run.py command on a terminal and having the environment variables set.

However, I had to create a specific file and indicate the way I wanted to run the backend app on Heroku.

So to enable…

A couple of years ago I saw this great blog post from peopleofcolorintech.com about stock photos with people of color in it. I found this amazing! I never thought about using my blog posts or other types of public content to spread more visual representations of people of color.

After reading this, I became aware of the existence of pictures/illustrations I could use that include people of color in online content such as blogs, presentations, promotion flyers, etc. …

Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program for university students to collaborate remotely with an open source organization during the summer. Students earn a stipend during this period. I participated in this initiative as a student collaborating with Systers Open Source organization. This is how I really got into understanding the spirit of Open Source and got to learn about it on many levels, initially as a contributor and then also as a maintainer. This year I am participating as a GSoC Admin with AnitaB.org Open Source (previously Systers Open Source).

Outreachy

Outreachy is a similar program to Google Summer…