Post about the challenges and lessons learned from starting to contribute to CocoaPods

This is a post based on a discussion about mentality and open source among programmers which took place in slack on the [22th of September](https://cocoapods.slack.com/archives/noise/s1411379024000049). It details my own experience starting out with CocoaPods and becoming more inclined to contribute to both CocoaPods and other projects. Please be brutal regarding any grammar and language mistakes.

The title is very much up for discussion, really had a hard time figuring out a good one
Tightening the above, as this is the "why should I read this post" call to action, and could probably be a bit terser.

On July the 7th I attended the [CocoaHeads Stockholm](http://www.meetup.com/CocoaHeads-Stockholm/) meetup. For this particular meetup the brilliant, but unknown to me at the time, [Orta Therox](https://twitter.com/orta) held a talk about open source, [CocoaPods](http://cocoapods.org/) and how they work at [Artsy](https://artsy.net/).

For very long time beforehand I had felt that I was not contributing enough back to all the awesome projects that I used daily; CocoaPods being one of them. Orta really inspired me to take the first steps to contribute back. I promptly went home and started working on a issue I found among the [CocoaPods issues](https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues) on GitHub. After finishing that I jumped straight on to another  related issue. After a landing a few PRs I was invited to the CocoaPods slack team to discuss further. This post talks about my first steps into contributing back to a large project.