My First Foray Into Open Source

As a former internal business unit manager at a bank, my breadth of professional experience typically did not involve leveraging open source projects to advance business initiatives for teams that I led. Much of what I had been used to was information or best practices dictated by either big name industry players (think Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, etc.) and also regulatory bodies (e.g. Federal Reserve Bank and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). So with this in mind, you can imagine my surprise that there are projects out there to which anyone can contribute code and are used by the wider community. For our group, we were given the open source project, Open Food Network (OFN). The goal of OFN is to create a marketplace by connecting local buyers, distributors, and producers of food to make a fairer and easier way to distribute food. In this post, I will briefly discuss my experience (and learnings) from setting up the project locally, jumping into unfamiliar territory, and attempting to make a contribution. Let’s get to it!

So our first toe in the pool of open source was to get the repo cloned down and set up locally on our own machines. This reminds me (rather un-fondly) of test I had in Chemistry class during junior high — I spent at least twice the amount of time necessary on a test because I chose not to read all the instructions. So back to our project setup, it should be simple enough to do for a bunch of students to clone a repo and figure it out right? Wrong.

After cloning the repo down, we struggled with getting the correct versions of RVM (Ruby Version Manager), Ruby, and postgresQL. The thing that saved us (after a good few hours of self-inflicted sadness), was reading the wiki which walked us through step-by-step of how to get everything up and running. Lesson learned, if someone took the time out of their day to write some documentation, it’s always a good idea to go read it before trying to figure it out on your own.

Once we all had the app running locally, we felt like we had crossed a massive milestone! The most painful part was over, we could get down to looking at some actual code and actually contributing — once again.

Nope, wrong again. While we knew that going into this the project was written with unfamiliar languages and frameworks, we had no idea how uncomfortable it would become for us to try and comprehend that code. To give an idea, our entire group is part of the front end program here at Turing — we eat, sleep, and breathe JavaScript. The code base for OFN was written in CoffeeScript, HAML, AngularJS, and Ruby — it took a bit getting used to but we vaguely started to get an idea of the code we were reading.

Now that we had finally figured out what were were looking at and how to get around (sort of), it was time to pick an open issue that we could help solve! After looking through the issues marked ‘good first issue’, we figured we could help with an issue to change add some functionality and make a logo clickable on the check out screen. How hard could this be to figure out? Turns out it, this was still difficult for us wrap our brains around so we ended up opting for a different issue. With our tail between our legs, we ended up attempting to solve a change to some text that rendered on the admin menus from “Enterprise Relationships” to “Enterprise Relationships”. Our group managed to find and change one portion of the menu text, however due everything still being pretty new to our minds, we were unsuccessful in closing out the issue. This was easily the most humbling part of the entire experience given that despite everything we learned over the course of a couple days, it still wasn’t quite enough to get us across the finish line.

You might be thinking, at this point, we must have been pretty discouraged that we weren’t able to contribute a single thing to the issue. On our bad days you would’ve been right, but after spending a few days running into a mental wall (repeatedly) and getting back up to do it all again the next day, I found this was one of the more profound experiences during my time at Turing. It wasn’t because we had figured out anything amazing, but because it really showed that some of the most valuable things in getting through what feels like an insurmountable challenge are venturing outside your comfort zone, asking for help, and being open to learning at every opportunity. That’s how learning happens, and that’s how we get better everyday as developers.

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