When I first started learning to write code, contributing to open source seemed terrifying. People talked about it as an amazing resource and made it seem like it would be easy to jump into a project. But I was hesitant to get involved because it would be very much an exercise of working in public. What if my code is bad? What if I don't understand what's happening? What if I embarrass myself?

Through contributing to open source projects over the last few years, I’ve learned a few lessons about how open source communities work. We're all human and we all want good code and good support for our code. In this session I’ll talk about what it was like to start contributing to a big open source project, and the lessons I learned along the way that eventually led to becoming an approver on a repository that I contributed to.