Becoming the Next You
A Student's guide to upskilling through Open Source and Writing Blogs
Introduction
Hey everyone, I am Hasnain Makada. I am building out Open Source with Hasnain where I encourage every beginner to get started contributing to open source and network with like-minded folks. I am also a core team member of ReactPlay which is an open-source platform where beginners who are learning react can upskill themselves by building projects and contributing to open source at the same time as well. I am also a beta(ฮฒ) student ambassador at Microsoft where I host several events for my community and upskill them. I also write my blogs regarding DevOps, Flutter and Open-Source on Hashnode and Showwcase.
What this blog is all about?
In this blog, I will tell you about my journey from being a student to becoming a Developer. This is a guidance blog for all the students who are out there studying in college and want to upskill themselves, but unfortunately, nobody is there to guide them. So taking this issue in hand I am going to show you the path to open source and how to start blogging as well.
Before jumping onto the main point, let me give you a glimpse of my journey,
Started in 2019
It was that time of the year when my 10th board exams were completed on 19th March 2019, and I was completely point blank at that time what I was going to do further, everyone was telling me to opt for science and pursue IIT, but unfortunately, science was out of scope for me as I was an average student at that time, So I opted for diploma in computer engineering as diploma also has a good chance of getting you into good Tier-3 colleges of India.
I opted for a diploma in computer engineering as there was pretty much good scope at that time and layoffs weren't happening (though I don't care about them). I have been pretty much good with computers since I was a kid and I followed my passion and opted for the same. But things started to change when I started diving deep into it.
When I was in my first year of computer engineering (Diploma) I didn't know about StackOverflow, GitHub and all of that nor was our college interested in teaching us. So I started with C at that time, my first programming language and I drastically failed my final exams (thrice), At that time I knew that programming was not for me and I started to mug up the codes and I cleared my exams.
Our college didn't tell us that we should also learn from youtube and that is why we were completely dependent on them whenever we faced any problems during programming.
First-year passed by the grace of god and I was promoted to my second year of Diploma.
The COVID-19 years
When I was promoted to my second year of diploma, Covid-19 broke out and we had our college learning in online mode. That was the biggest life-changing time for me, we only had our college on zoom for 2-3 hours a day and the rest of the day we were free as usual, So that's why I started studying on youtube.
Initially, I started learning Data Structures in C from the Code with Harry playlist and my knowledge regarding programming got better and better. After doing data structures and problem-solving for more than 3 months, I started learning Java from him and I also completed his Java playlist. After then I started with web development, Git and GitHub and I eventually got better than most of my classmates. I scored a 9.0+ SPI in my second year of engineering and not even studying my college syllabus in depth. Just from youtube
Youtube is the biggest source of learning If you know how to use it wisely. I started my journey as a programmer by learning from tutorials on youtube and implementing that knowledge in my college studies.
My Open Source and Learning in public Journey
After developing various skills from youtube and having a general understanding of tech, I then started watching Eddie Jaoude(s) videos on youtube where he explains the importance of open source and why everyone should start contributing to open source. When I first started with open source, I was confused about where to start, but by watching one or two videos regarding open source, I got a general understanding of how it works and how we can start contributing to it.
Let me break down how you should also start contributing to open-source.
Step 1: First of all, find a good organization, In my case, I found the EddieHub Community. After then find the project the organization have and pick any project of your choice.
Step 2: Firstly when starting out contributing, don't just directly jump to the main codebase, first start with the readme and analyze the readme in detail because no readme is perfectly curated, and there is always a scope for improvement. Even just fixing a typo creates a good impression of yours on the project.
Step 3: Always look out for good first issues on the projects because they are easy to solve and can give you confidence
Step 4: Go to the good first issue finder by the eddiehub, You can find thousands of good first issues over there to solve.
Step 5: Reach out to the maintainers directly in case you encounter any queries regarding the project.
So these were the steps or tips I have given to you were the most crucial pieces of learning when I started out contributing to open-source, and since then there was no going back
When I started contributing to open source, I noticed the importance of learning in public by watching Kunal kushwaha's videos, He stated how learning in public will change your life and he was true.
While contributing to open-source, I also got the chance to become a core team member of ReactPlay which is an open-source platform to learn to create and share ReactJS projects with the Developer Community. A big thanks to Tapas Adhikary Sir for providing me with this wonderful opportunity.
Learning in public doesn't just mean posting whatever you are learning, It also means collaborating with other people, guiding them if they are wrong anywhere and making sure you are always learning and improving yourself as well as your community.
So when I started my learning in the public journey, I found out about showwcase and also I started my blog on Hashnode. Finding out about Showwcase was the best thing of my life, I got the opportunity to participate in a lot of challenges and won awesome swags too. Then I participated in hacktoberfest and also made an impact by contributing to other projects as well.
I also contributed to the showwcase academy with the flutter roadmap, provided my knowledge and worked alongside the team on providing high-quality resources for everyone. It was one of my greatest achievements to date.
So you can see that learning in public changed my life, and it can change yours too.
You can check out my few articles on open source at showcase ๐
How to start your blog?
I get many questions and people also have different perspectives on how to start blogging, but when I started, I wasn't that experienced in writing nor I knew the latest blogging tools which are out with the help of AI.
Before starting to blog make sure you have a domain-specific blog, In my case I started my blogging journey on 3 things, "Open-Source", "DevOps" and "Flutter".
I initially started on Hashnode and also started posting my blogs on Showwcase as well, but with the canonical URL, because I always reposted my blogs on showwcase. When creating your blog, make sure to use grammar correcting tools such as Grammarly, because we often tend to make writing mistakes and tools such as Grammarly help us in correcting those mistakes.
Have consistency in writing and you'll eventually get better at blogging.
For more information regarding writing blogs, check out these awesome shows by Tapas Adhikary sir, because this is one of the best resources regarding blogs I have found so far...
Wrapping Up!!!
I hope that you must have got an idea of how to start learning in public and also how you can start your blog while you are in college, make sure to check out the resources which I've linked inside this blog and if you've any further queries, feel free to reach out on Showwcase and Twitter.
Till then, Happy Coding ๐