I submitted my first PR the day before yesterday and it got accepted. I'm quite happy about it.
This PR was more about the form than the content. It's just that the project documentation was a bit outdated and needed a small modification. I got stuck in the deployment process myself.
During the exchange with the maintainers, I also had some ideas.
I've never been confident in my English expression skills because I don't have much experience. I feel insecure about my choice of words, sentence structure, and slang expressions during communication, fearing that I might unintentionally come across as impolite. In this exchange, I was very stiff, feeling like an emotionless translation machine. But I really struggle to find the right balance between being lighthearted and polite. These things will definitely require some learning if I get the chance.
A rigorous attitude. This time, I only changed one line in the document without giving it much thought. I thought it was a reasonable idea given my knowledge and technical abilities. But the maintainer asked me a confusing question. There's no way around it, I need to study the technology more solidly.
I have great admiration for maintainers. The maintainer took the time to communicate with me, a newbie, in their spare time. It was originally a very small change that the developer could have handled in a minute, but it took three days for us to communicate across time zones. The maintainer's response to my inadequate handling of something that seemed obvious to them (in terms of technical level) was quite clear to me. It was my lack of understanding. The maintainer's wording was humble, not directly pointing out my mistake, but asking for my reasons and whether I actually encountered any issues. They ended with a thank you.
I've always been very eager to be a part of the open-source world. But for a self-taught programmer like me, it's really not easy. Although I have been working on projects during my graduate studies, I'm still very weak in coding, theory, and computer fundamentals. I hope that one day my technical skills will accumulate to the point where I can easily contribute to projects I love. This small step is a big one.
