Contributing to open-tacos

The back story from 2023 :

I came across this project OpenBeta. I liked the project and the fact that they are building on top of open-street maps, which we tried to use in our projects back in the logistics company I worked with. It is an open-source project and I got lost in the code for quite some time. Later I looked for issues and felt overwhelmed. As a first-time contributor, I wanted to take a safe bet and pick a ‘good first issue’ usually meant for first-timers.

I managed to get a small setting issue assigned to me, where I had to update an API key.

In order to set up the project, I forked the repo (only develop branch) and then cloned it on the local machine as I wanted to start with the front end of the project.

Installed yarn and tried to install dependencies. That's when it kept saying that the node version was incompatible.

I tried to solve it for some time and then thought, maybe I must go with docker to avoid such incompatibilities.

Installed Docker.

Opened the project in VS Code. Launched a terminal in the IDE and then ran below code to start the container

docker compose up

This got stuck at step 5 for quite some time. Although I could see the container on the docker desktop, it still didn't work. So I terminated it and used the below command.

docker compose up --build

This time it successfully ran and showed a message that the application is running at localhost:3000

I raised a PR. I was hoping to get it approved until the next morning when I found that it had a migration of data involved and needed backend work. This blocked my PR and the author closed my PR.

PRESENT

I have not been that busy during the last two months of the year since the pandemic. I got back to check if I could contribute to the open-source. I found a new issue and this time, I didn’t think before working on it. I resolved the issue on my local machine and then commented on the issue about raising the PR.

I explored the project code a little deeper this time and I found it really interesting. Although I don’t climb, I like how they work to help the community. It made me feel happy that I could do something outside my regular work, (which actually doesn’t make a great impact, I will talk about it in detail some other time).

I raised a PR and it got approved within hours. It is a simple change, where the base URL had an extra ‘/’ in the path. This was causing the URL to have double slash in the copied URL link.

It is a minor contribution, but it gave me confidence and motivation to do more for the community. I have got another issue assigned to me yesterday. Looking forward to share about that too very soon.

Thank you for reading so far. Happy coding!