Introduction
Hello everyone, my name is Somaa Chukwu and I am a full stack software engineer. My interest in tech blossomed from wanting to create softwares to help people in their day to day life. I'm currently learning ethical hacking and blockchain development. I participated in She Code Africa Contributhon 2022. This was my first time contributing to open-source. I've always been curious to know what the buzz around open-source is and this was the perfect opportunity to find out.
Project
I worked on the Jenkins Screenshots Updates project. The Jenkins project released user interface improvements as part of Jenkins 2.332.1 on March 9, 2022. The screenshots in the documentation on www.jenkins.io needed to be updated to show the current user interface rather than the outdated user image Jenkins used in the documentation.
Work Done
During the project, I worked with my mentor @MarkEWaite in identifying the pages in the documentation with screenshots that need updating. We made a spreadsheet to track our progress and identify what pages have been worked on.
Experience Gained
As a beginner in contributing to open-source, I can say I'm confident in contributing to open-source projects after participating in She Code Africa Contributhon 2022. I had the opportunity to work in a team, communicate with others and that has helped build up my interpersonal communication skills. I also got to learn about Jenkins software and how to use it to automate the building process for my software projects. I also had a lot of practical experience using git and Github, creating new branches to avoid compromising the master branch before merging and also opening pull requests amongst others.
Room For Improvement?
Overall, I have had a smooth experience and this is definitely something I would do again. It was amazing to have worked with the Jenkins team and doing work on the documentation. The most challenging part of the project was setting up my environment, everything looked and sounded new and strange. Creating a beginner-friendly tutorial to help people who are totally new quickly find their way around Jenkins would reduce time spent on setting up the working environment and allow more time to work on the project.
Next Steps
Going forward, I have an open mind towards contributing to open source and will spend a great deal of my time contributing to Jenkins and to other open-source projects. I'm also going to raise more awareness on open-source through my youtube channel and podcast encouraging more people to start contributing. Thank you to She Code Africa, to everyone at Jenkins and to @MarkEWaite for the best opportunity.