I reached an exciting milestone unexpectedly today! I made my first open source contribution to a Github #awesome-list!
If you’re not familiar already, awesome-lists are carefully curated resources for any and all things you can think of! So you might have an awesome-list for open-source CSS helpers, for example, or even an awesome-list for all things LARPing!
My particular contribution was to this awesome-macropad GitHub repo! You might remember my Adafruit RP2040 Macropad Project from this past week; well, my custom git, Mac Chrome, VSCode, Zoom, and Misc. macro codes are now available to anyone interested!
As a newbie, I was feeling hesitant to contribute to an open source project, as it felt like something above my skill level — however, this repo owner of the awesome-macropad list had some really valuable words of encouragement and wisdom:
“Imposter Syndrome Disclaimer: There might be a little voice inside that tells you you’re not ready; that you need to do one more tutorial, or learn another framework, or write a few more blog posts before you can help me with this project.
I assure you, that’s not the case.“
I think this can apply to almost any open source project. Imposter Syndrome is a real thing, especially as a woman in tech, so this hit home and was especially inspiring.
Not only has contributing given me an amazing learning opportunity, but it’s been extremely redeeming as well. I can’t explain the excitement I got when I saw my contribution was added, and even more so when I noticed Adafruit Industries published a blog on my project!
This experience stemmed *no pun intended* from a fun side project, and has turned into something even larger than I could’ve imagined. I can’t wait to continue to contribute to open source projects in the future!
Happy coding,
</Jessica>
Web Jess 
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