The day before yesterday, I submitted my first PR, and it was accepted. I'm quite happy about it.
This PR was more about form than content; it was just that the project documentation was a bit outdated, and a small part needed to be modified. I was slightly misled during the deployment process.
During the brief exchanges with the maintainers, I also had some thoughts.
I have always lacked confidence in my English expression skills because I have little experience. I feel insecure about word choice and idiomatic expressions during communication, fearing that I might inadvertently come across as impolite. In this exchange, I was quite stiff, feeling like an emotionless translation machine. However, I really struggle to balance being relaxed and humorous with being polite. These are things I definitely need to learn when I have the opportunity.
A rigorous attitude. This time, I only changed one line in the documentation, but I didn't think it through well. Under the constraints of my knowledge level and technical ability, I thought there was no problem, which was actually a taken-for-granted assumption. I was left confused when the maintainer asked me about it. There's no way around it; I still need to solidly learn the technology.
I have great respect for the maintainers. They must also be communicating with a newbie like me in their spare time. What was originally a very small change could have been handled by the developer in a minute, but instead, we exchanged six sentences across time zones and communicated for three days. Regarding my handling of something that didn't make much sense (due to my technical level), I feel it was quite clear that it was my lack of understanding. The maintainer's wording was full of humility; they didn't point it out directly but instead asked for my reasoning and whether I had indeed encountered a problem, and finally expressed their gratitude.
I have always longed for the open-source world. However, for a self-taught programmer, it's really not easy. Although I was working on projects during my graduate studies, I still feel very weak in coding, theory, and computer fundamentals. I hope that one day I can accumulate enough skills to contribute easily to projects I like. This small step is a big step!
