I spend a lot of my free time writing code. I usually work on my own
personal projects that never really go anywhere. So, I decided to take
a detour from my normal hacking routine and contribute to an existing
free software project. My contribution was accepted awhile ago now,
but I wasn’t blogging then so I’m rambling about it now.

It’s wise to find a project with a low barrier of entry. An active IRC
channel and/or mailing list with people willing to help newcomers is
ideal. I remembered hearing about GNU MediaGoblin at LibrePlanet
2012, so I decided to check things out. MediaGoblin is a media sharing
web application written in Python. Their bug tracker marks tickets
that require little work and don’t require a deep understanding of
MediaGoblin as ‘bitesized’.

I chose to work on this ticket because it didn’t require any
complicated database migrations or knowledge of the media processing
code. I added a new configuration option, ‘allow_comments’, and a
small amount of code to enforce the setting.

Eventually, the ticket got reviewed and Christopher Webber
(MediaGoblin’s friendly project leader) merged it: "Heya. Great
branch, this works perfectly. Merged!"

It was a very small change, but I was happy to finally have some
actual code of mine in a real free software project. I have a strong
passion for free software and the GNU philosophy, so it’s really great
to participate in the community. My job as a professional software
developer eats up a lot of my time these days, but I hope to find the
time to continue hacking and contributing.

From the blog dthompson by David Thompson and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.