✨ humble beginnings

Since I made a career change, I knew that contributing to Open Source would be one of my free-time priorities as I deeply believe in collectivism and equity. Feeling a very strong presence of impostor syndrome, I initially contributed in the form of docs, tutorials or code-along lessons to various Open Source projects, mainly coding curricula. Writing has been always easier for me and years in formal and non-formal education helped me develop a sense of how to break complex issues down for newbies.

🌪 picking up speed

My first Open Source contribution was to girls.js curriculum for girls and women in Poland. Since then, I started enhancing the curriculum of my work place, Flatiron School. I care deeply about web accessibility and diversity and representation in tech and so I'd not only add new material, amend old one or fix code to be more a11y-friendly, I'd also add more diverse set of characters in the covert curriculum. Each of such commits would the waterfall down onto many children of the main repo. I wrote about it in April:

💥 contribution implosion

Three months later (all during long hours of lockdown), I was getting close to 15k contributions. My github profile was hardly ever visible. Here's the last time I was able to load it:

A month later, in late July, I was not able to access my profile ever. The course I was co-teaching at Yale was ending and I was worried that my malfunctioning github account would impact my chances of catching a recruiter's eye.

🌟 happy resolution

I reached out to Github support and they did confirm that this number of commits is resulting in a timeout error:

The only solution was to change the settings of my contribution chart from showing all possible contributions to only those made on my own repos:

This, of course, did not stop me from contributing — ✨ I am giddily participating in Hacktoberfest both as a participant and as a maintainer ✨
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📷 cover photo by Engin Akyurt from pexels