It's now been 6 months of contributing to OSS, and after more than 300 commits, I can confidently say that nothing else has helped me improve as much in software engineering and meet this many incredible engineers
Some of the people I interacted with include personal heroes of mine, like
@matteocollina, who singlehandedly pulled me into the node ecosystem and then to
@fastifyjs
At a time when I was looking for the JS equivalent of Rails, Django, and Laravel, Fastify was love at first sight. Its excellent yet easy-to-understand architecture was what attracted me at first, but the principles and community were what lit the fire in me and resulted in my first PR
Was it a perfect PR? Of course not! But the highly supportive feedback of the maintainers immediately improved my skills and taught me a bunch of things that would've otherwise taken months to figure out. After this first PR got merged, the feedback loop was simply too strong not to continue
I could write a lot more about Fastify, but the central idea here is to find that piece of software that gives you joy to use, and then to learn what kind of philosophy led to that project. If you fall in love with both the project and its ideals, chances are you will have the urge to do something to improve it