Over this past summer, I have grown a bit of a summer fling.

This fling is with open source.

I have been a member of ND Linux User’s Group, and programming for years, but it took me till this summer to get past the barrier of working on projects.

I don’t know why, but that first PR can be so intimidating even though you know the developers are generally friendly people and open to contributions.

However, my heart sunk and I was so nervous when I submitted my first PR to gitlab CE.

I saw a little bell notification a few days later, and I honestly dreaded looking at it. However, when I finally gained the courage, I saw there was positive and friendly feedback on my code. After a quick commit, it was added and implemented into Gitlab’s source code!

That experience was awesome, and I was just hooked from there.

Since then, this summer I have worked on contributions for a variety of Cloud tools, packaging for Solus, and as developer on a project with some friends from school!

I really think open source is more than just the symbiotic relationship between companies, but it also is a great place for young students to grow and fall in love with programming again.