My First Encounter Making A Pull Request to an Open-source Project

Just like every other newbie in the tech space dwelling on learning and writing codes, I never really thought so much about pulling a request to any project at all, not to mention contributing to one, and not just any project but an open-source project! Thrilling isn’t it? Well, I did it.

Over the course of this article, I will share my own experience doing all of that. First let's identify some strange tech words like what a pull request means, open-source project, and many others as I share more.

According to PagerDuty

“A pull request – also referred to as a merge request – is an event that takes place in software development when a contributor/developer is ready to begin the process of merging new code changes with the main project repository”.

So basically a pull request lets you tell others about changes you have pushed to a branch in a repository on Github, it helps in submitting contributions to an open development project. Speaking of open development projects, let's throw more light on what an open-source project is all about.

As the name implies, an open-source project literally means anybody is free to contribute, develop, use, study, or even distribute your project for any purpose. Hence an open-source code project has its source code available to the public. Mr. Rufai Mustapha who happens to be my JavaScript facilitator at The Bulb Africa made me understand that there are a lot of open-source projects out there like Java via OpenJDK (Open Java Development Kit) since it became supported by Oracle after being developed and supported by Sun Microsystems, however other open-source are VLC, React, and Mozilla. According to Pavan Vadapalli at upGrad:

Open source projects are an excellent way for coders and developers to test their mettle and learn more advanced methods. In an open-source project, there will be many contributors of varying skill levels and expertise.

Open Source projects can vary in size, scope, and level of difficulty. Therefore, it is important to choose the right project at the right stage of your progress. Beginner-level coders should choose projects of that level of difficulty. You can find this on GitHub by looking for projects marked with “Beginner” or “good first issue” labels.”

Anyways let’s not get side-tracked, as I am proud to contribute to the Nigeria logos project by Paystack. The obvious question is what is the Nigeria logos project? So it is an open-source project that displays logos of Nigerian companies. Contributors are required to keep adding new Nigerian logos as its not all Nigerian logos that are currently there.

I made contribution through the GitHub repository link on the site where I followed the pattern from the guideline of the project. After understanding how I am suppose to go about it from the guideline, I immediately forked the entire project as a repository on my GitHub from there I proceeded to clone it to my local machine (my laptop).

This is the stage where I started thinking of which Nigerian company logo to add to the project. I thought long and hard, saw a few that were not yet added then I realized the company I am currently running software engineering internship has not gotten their logo up there yet! Remember The Bulb Africa!! So I downloaded The Bulb Africa’s logo, made some changes to the required file type, pushed it to GitHub and made a pull request.

As simple as that... That is how I contributed to an open-source project, quite easily done if you ask me. Let me know how yours went, I am so intrigued to know. If you have not contributed yet, give it a try.