The Beginning: My Start into Open-Source Development 
Tags: opensource
Published: 2020-09-18 14:29:57

## Intro
My name is Devansh Shah. I am currently a student living in Toronto and actively looking for internships. Over the years I have attempted to do a lot with my skill set in programming but I have always found Open-Source Development to be a jarring task. Over the years I have used Open-source code in my projects but I have never really gotten into contributing to Open-source development. However, this stops now! Over the next few months I will be actively starting to contribute to the Open-Source community and I will blog my experience here. This blog will show you some of my interests and my plan for how I will go about this intimidating task.


## The Plan

![planning image](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1484480974693-6ca0a78fb36b?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=1352&q=80)
<span>Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@glenncarstenspeters?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText">Glenn Carstens-Peters</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/plan?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></span>

First, I will write this blog post as a starting point. Then, I will keep up with trending GitHub repos to see what interests me and fork them to my personal GitHub. I will then look over the code repo for this project and then check out how I can contribute to the project. Another step in my plan includes networking with the community within these projects to find ways I can be an asset to their projects. Finally, I will actively blog this process and also let you know about my successes and failures dealing with development. 


## The Projects
The projects I have researched up till this point that interest me and hopefully I will contribute to in the future are the following repos.

1. https://github.com/mikecao/umami
2. https://github.com/carloscuesta/gitmoji
3. https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js
4. https://github.com/fable-compiler/Fable
5. https://github.com/QuantConnect/Lean

These are visibly not the only projects I wish to contribute to but just a small list of projects that interest me with the little bit of research I have done.

The First one is an alternative to Google Analytics which interests me because I want to build tools that help users add value to their activities and a tool that allows the user to analyze their data is a perfect example.

The second one is actually an initiative that standardizes the use of emojis on GitHub commit messages. This project it allows contributors to contribute to the large Open-source community on GitHub. 
 
The third one is interesting for me as it's a JavaScript Library for AR/VR creation. AR/VR are just quite intriguing topics for me and working on a library that assists developers create such things is a really superb fit for myself, and something I am very excited to work on.

The fourth one is a F# compiler that outputs JavaScript code compatible with ES2015. This one is interesting because I recently tried to learn F#, while JavaScript was the first language I learned. To work on something that I am learning with something I have been learning since 2014 is incredible.

The last one is an open-source algorithmic trading engine known as Lean. Lean is compelling for me because I enjoy programming and have a strong interest in trading. This one seems more challenging than the rest but I hope that one day I will be a able to work on projects such as this, and this is my first step in making that a reality.



##  The Closing 
This is only the beginning and I look forward to sharing more over the next few months about this experience. If you have an interesting story about your Open-source journey, please leave it in the comments so we can connect and see where this journey will lead. "A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step." 

This is my first step.


-ZG

<span>Heading Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@laroussephoto?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText">Katie Doherty</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/open-source?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></span>