Am very passionate about women, leadership with impact, and tech. And that’s how I was involved in She Code Africa-a non-profit organization focused on celebrating and empowering young girls and women in tech across Africa. The organization presented a program for developers to participate in open source contributions and I was lucky to be among the chosen few after the various interviews. Hooray! this was my dream come true. I have always wanted to be involved in the contribution of large-scale software and that way I would feel I was contributing to solving the problems of many people across the world using technology.
Early April we were oriented into the program and personally knew that I would be working on the Jenkins project. Jenkins is an open-source automation server that enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software. I was excited and curious at the same time. Being a java developer, I had interacted with Jenkins before but did not go so deep into it and this was a very good chance to learn even more. I was assigned to work on the input step plugin.
I had various tasks including preparation and pipeline experience which was meant to give us a chance to download the various things that were required to run Jenkins. We built Jenkins plugins, got to modify existing pipeline help, and also insert the missing pipeline help. We were also supposed to suggest pipeline syntax snippet generator in plugins docs and in my case I did for the input step plugin. I was able to do all the tasks and submitted two pull requests that am happy to say were successfully merged. github.com/luciahroyalty101/pipeline-input-.. and github.com/jenkinsci/pipeline-input-step-pl…
I have really gained a lot from the program, from interacting with different dev from different backgrounds to interacting more with Jenkins and getting to actively contribute.
The challenges that I experienced personally were to do with time difference where some meetings were conducted quite late in the night in my local time. Getting to contribute for the first time was quite a challenge too but this one was solved by the very intensive research plus the active support from our mentors.
I hope to get to contribute to open-source projects even more in the future now that a breakthrough has already been accomplished for me. I would also propose that during such a project the mentees can get a platform to interact actively with the rest of the contributors for networking and also in case of any queries they can be assisted conveniently. The mentees can also be presented with a tutorial for a task maybe once a week to smoothen their development in contribution.
Am really grateful for the whole program, thanks to She Code Africa and Jenkins for providing a platform to contribute actively. To the mentors who guide us all through, am grateful for your assistance and the sacrifice you really put in to ensure that we come this far successfully.