Introduction
My name is Okafor Peace, I am a Technical Writer from Nigeria and I love learning how to write more meaningful code & contributing to open source. I love Tech and I am interested in exploring the tech industry. Contributing to open source was one of the decisions I made for myself this year which led me to apply for the She Code Africa Contributhon. However, for the open-source Contributhon, I worked on the Jenkins “Inclusive Naming” project and I will say this is one of the best decisions I have ever made.
Inclusive Naming is a Jenkins open-source project for renaming terminologies that were already outdated or out of line with what Jenkins wanted to be as a project. Some of those terminologies include:
- Renaming Master to Controller or Main
- Renaming Slave to Agent
- Renaming Whitelist to Allow
- Renaming Blacklist to Disallow
Summary of the Boot Camp
The boot camp officially kicked off with the onboarding call held on the 5th of April, 2022. In attendance were the different mentees assigned to various projects under the Jenkins, and other organizations, mentors for the individual projects, the She Code Africa POCs, and the Open-Source Programs Manager at She Code Africa, Zainab Abubakar. The Jenkins team were all added to the continuous delivery foundation slack group and we started slow and moved on steadily.
The first two weeks went on with more calls, setting up our working environment, onboarding, and introductory sessions within the community. I was paired with a co-mentee, Catherine . We were to contribute to the same project – the Inclusive Naming project, under the guidance of our assigned mentor, Mark Waite .
Challenges Faced
Filled with so much excitement and energy initially, I faced lots of challenges setting up my work environment and it was a bit frustrating. It was two weeks out and I had not made sufficient progress when it seemed as though every other mentee was killing it but me. All thanks to my Mentor @MarkEWaite. I reached out to him, informed him of my blockers, and requested a walk-through to tackle the issue.
Mark Waite’s swift response is something I will not fail to commend as he always responded almost immediately anytime there is an issue despite his busy schedule. Sometimes he would fix a call to get things sorted and it was then I discovered I might have had my development environment set up the wrong way. I had to go through a long, frustrating round of uninstallations and installations, setting up my environment within my Windows Operating System. Also, at this time, Google was my very best friend and I found solace. For more details on how I was able to set up my environment, see it here.
Experience Gained
I have enhanced my technical skills by learning more about how to Contribute to open source. I have also learned how to create pull requests, fork a plugin and edit locally then push to live. I was able to familiarize myself more with code versioning tools such as Git and GitHub.
Improved my knowledge of how to effectively use GitHub to contribute to open source as that has always been a problem for me and I had no clue about it before starting the Bootcamp. To check all the contributions I made on GitHub, click here.
I developed other soft skills, such as teamwork, communication and collaboration, by giving feedback, and criticisms and generally communicating constructively.
Feedback
I request that in future Contributions, a complete and detailed explanation of how to set up a working environment be given to the participants to contribute effectively to the assigned project. That way, they won’t get confused along the line and there will be ample time to contribute without having to spend a lot of time setting up the development environment.
Next Step
I would like to first of all thank the She Code Africa team and the Jenkins organization for this opportunity. This was just the right push I needed to get into open source and I’m indeed grateful. It has given me the enabling environment and platform to contribute and I can proudly call myself an open-source contributor.