Blog Posts

Getting started with contributing to Open-Source Projects like Carvel

by Varsha Munishwar — Jun 9, 2022

Contributing to open-source projects like Carvel for the first time can be overwhelming and difficult to know where to begin. Few years back, I was working as a software engineer building enterprise applications using Java, Spring Framework, and REST APIs. We would deploy the applications using Jenkins and Maven configurations along with other CI/CD tools.

I took a break for family reasons. After a couple of years, I returned to work through a returnship opportunity at VMware (Carvel team). My new work was in a completely different domain, and I needed to start from the basics. I was overwhelmed and a bit lost in the myriad of information. With the new technologies, programming and configuration languages, and the new open-source community experience, I was not sure where to start and had so many questions. I can share my experience and a few ideas with you to help you get started with contributing to open source projects.

Stepping out of comfort zone and taking the first step is crucial to success! ¶

Diving into open source was entirely out of my comfort zone. I took a first step to understand where I stood and started gathering answers to all the questions I had:

• What are open-source projects?
• What are the advantages of contributing to open-source projects?
• What is an open-source community?
• What are Containers, Docker and Kubernetes?
• What is the Carvel all about?
• How to work with Git and GitHub?
• What is the difference between GitHub and GitLab?

It was all new and yes, too much to digest all at once. Fortunately, I got a very knowledgeable mentor who enjoyed teaching. Alongside, I got help from my manager to put together a plan to ramp up. He also provided helpful resources such as kube academy courses and tutorials.

But, if you do not have a mentor, fear not! The Open-Source Community is very welcoming and happy to help new contributors learn how to contribute.

What I learned about “learning” in this journey ¶

Thinking back, here are some things I learned:

• Staying organized is a critical part of the learning process.
• Keeping accessible notes on various topics (e.g. Go, Git, Kubernetes, Starlark, Yaml, Carvel, ytt) in different formats such as screenshots, recordings, writeups, etc., help extract the important contents.
• Persistence in seeking to understand “why?” helps with thorough understanding
• Keep going forward amidst the ambiguity and deep dive enough in one area to solve the problem at hand.
• It’s not always enough to only read or listen, doing it myself is the most important aspect of learning.
• Nothing is impossible if I put my mind at it.
• Hard work, patience and perseverance can help climb any steep learning curve.

It’s OK to start small! ¶

When I started exploring Carvel and its features, I found a couple of places in documentation that needed updates/typo corrections. I mentioned this to my team and got a green signal to make the change. I set up my local environment, understood the basics of Git to raise PRs, got my changes reviewed, and committed them to the repo. This was my first contribution. The following contributions included bug fixes and feature implementations.

Why ¶

It is not easy to get started contributing to Open-Source Software. But there are a number of benefits:

• Open-source contributions help you get feedback to improve your technical skills
• Learn the programming patterns used by experienced developers
• Get hands on experience with the code
• Improve the product usability for your needs as well as for other users
• Participate in the community
• With these contributions, you learn a lot about yourself/code/product.

Where ¶

Here are some suggestions where you can contribute:

• Improve documentation by adding information/summary/missing steps
• Add examples to repo
• Raise issues/bugs
• Check for issues labeled with Good first issue
• Add FAQs or “How to” section for a common problem/scenario

How ¶

New to Carvel? Don’t worry, we have got a lot of resources to help you out:

• Visit the Carvel product homepage to learn about the product
• Take the Product Tour (note: VMware’s Tanzu products use Carvel, but you do not have to learn anything about Tanzu to use Carvel, yourself)
• Visit the Contributing Doc for reference
• Fork and clone a repo - e.g. carvel-ytt
• Make the appropriate changes and raise a Pull Request (PR)
• Reach out to us via Carvel’s Slack Channel in the Kubernetes Slack Workspace for any support you need.
  (visit http://slack.k8s.io/ to join the Kubernetes Slack workspace if you are not already there.)

Looking forward to seeing your first contribution!

This is the first blog in a series on how you can contribute to open-source projects like Carvel. So, stay tuned …