I participated in the 2 days of PyCon Israel 2023 where Irit Katriel was the opening keynote speaker. I had the good luck of meeting her at the speakers dinner the evening before the conference and then also during the workshop days.
Among many other things we talked a bit about open source contributions. Probably partially as I was leading a workshop getting the participants to send their first pull-requests to open source projects.
She mentioned that one of her first contributions to the Python core was a typo fix which was then approved by Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. I can imagine the ego boost, even though looking at her resume, I don’t think Irit needed that.
Now she is an employee at Microsoft full-time working on Python sending lots of pull-requests.
A few things I take away from this:
- You don’t shy away from a typo-fix even if you are an already accomplished developer with many years of experience.
- It’s OK to start with small contributions. Your work will be noticed and as you get involved more your status will grow.
- You don’t need a lot of expertise to get your name into a big project: just find a typo to fix or make an improvement in the documentation.
- I did not know that these days Microsoft has full-time employees working on Python and that even while working at the Bank of America she was already encouraged to contribute to cpython.