Big Day in My Career

To prefix this post, I would just like to make sure that you are aware of just how big a nerd I really am. I've probably got 7 computers laying around my apartment. I dream about programming (in fact, I've solved some frustrating programming problems in my sleep). The other day I had a conversation with a good friend of mine about how much faster and more efficient it is to use the keyboard for various things as opposed to moving a mouse around and clicking on things. That's just a taste.

Anyway, for several years, I've wanted to contribute something--a fix, a new feature, etc--to at least one open source project. The problem is that I've never really found anywhere to contribute amongst the programs I actually use. Either I didn't know how to accomplish something or I just didn't see that anything could be improved. It was quite frustrating.

Yesterday I was going along, doing my regular work, when I encountered a problem in an e-commerce framework called Satchmo. This problem made the website I was working on blow up. I couldn't successfully complete an order. At first I had no idea where the problem was. Eventually, I figured out a way to find what part of the framework was causing problems. I took a peek at the code and saw what seemed to be a solution. I made the change and all of the sudden I could complete orders on the website!

I was so stoked! I created a patch from the change that I made to the code. Then I opened a ticket on Satchmo's issue tracking system, described the problem briefly, attached my patch, and went on working. A few hours later, I got an email from the issue tracking system, saying that my patch has been accepted and has been applied to the codebase!

Finally!!! After all these years! I am an official contributor to an open source project. It feels good. Hopefully this is the first of many contributions to come.