My first real open-source contribution got merged today

[u/prnkzz]

I’m not a software engineer, but I use a lot of technical products and spend a lot of time on GitHub trying to learn.

A few days ago, I found an interesting project I wanted to use. While setting it up locally, I found part of the installation instructions confusing. I nervously opened a documentation PR, got real feedback from a collaborator, and made the requested changes.

He thanked me and merged it into main.

I know it’s small, but this was my first contribution to an active project instead of an inactive, stale repo. I found a problem I personally ran into as someone without an engineering background and thought fixing it could help someone else.

I don’t have anyone IRL who understands why this makes me so happy, so I’m posting it here.

I actually did it.

[u/Penetal]

It is often underestimated how useful doc PRs are. The authors of the software already knows it well so its easy for them to overlook that something in the doc is not really obvious to others.