Open Source: A little contribution is still a contribution

We as a web developers are really confortable using tools that are out there ready to be used, robust & tested… we sometimes rely on some of this tools too much, and one thing we did not realize is that those tools where made by other developers like you.. FOR FREE

so I was starting a new project with React Native and I needed to create a custom native module, so I went to the official documentation & started reading…

What I found was for me, a web developer with design background was hard to understand some of the steps on the tutorial. I lost around 45mins figuring out where I needed to add the code the tutorial was telling to add. I don;t know about you but for me 45mins it’s a lot of time!

At this point I could do two things: complain on twitter about it to the maintainers, or help improve the documentation so someone else can get a better experience following the tutorial.

It took me 20mins to update the documentation & create a pull request, I did not needed to clone the repo, I did it in github itself.

What matters here is that, even when you do a little contribution as i did, the feeling of helping something bigger than yourself, something that can impact more people, is what drives you to be a better developer & help others in the way. for me, helping others is an indirect way to improve & get better at things.

Hope this little story can inspire you to start thinking about contributing to OSS, even with documentation (that is actually a lot to do in that area!)

cheers!