Django: Getting Started With Open Source Through Community Events

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A new Django blog post/announcement has been posted!

In July, I joined Raffaella Suardini and Sage Abdullah for the Djangonaut Space Space Reviewers Episode 6, where we reviewed a Django PR during a live stream. This was a fun event. I won’t get into the technical aspects of the review, and I won’t point out the many mistakes I made. Instead, I want to revisit several “getting started with open source” community events and reflect on my personal growth since I first got involved with open source.

I hope this encourages others to attend those events and similarly get involved!

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Tutorial office hours 🕐

My first open source contribution happened accidentally during DjangoCon US 2023. I volunteered to host office hours to help tutorial attendees set up their development environments. I went through the tutorial projects, found a missing dependency in one of them, and reported it on the conference chat. A conference organizer, Tim Schilling, responded and suggested that I open a pull request (PR) to the project. I remember thinking to myself, “Really? I can do that?”.

Sprints 🏃

During the Sprint Days of the conference, I participated and opened two PRs to address accessibility issues. I didn’t know much about accessibility at that point, and I would not have known how to navigate the contribution process and pick out issues on my own. Thankfully, the project leaders were there to guide new contributors, and I was able to gain hands-on experience with these first few PRs.

Testathons 🧪

There was another event that took place during the Sprint Days called Testathon. I had heard of hackathons before, but I had not heard of testathons. I attended and found out they were like live stream coding or grou...

Get the full details here: Getting Started With Open Source Through Community Events | Weblog | Django