Five Years of Open Source

Today marks five years since I contributed to open source. I mainly contributed to a rhythm game called osu!, so I will focus on that.

Let’s talk about dates before February 14. On GitHub, it said that I joined on January 10. But I was lurking a bit before that when I was following osu!(lazer) builds. I remembered watching a video about the progress done at the end of 2017 when it came out. I, unfortunately, do not remember how or when I started following. Maybe it was that video, maybe not. I then joined the osu!dev Discord on February 12. Two days later I started contributing.

My first two contributions on this day five years ago were of course issues. They were on the game’s website: ppy/osu-web#2403 and ppy/osu-web#2404. I was the nitpicky type on day one, who knew. The fixes were PRed by the maintainers like 5 hours later and were merged a day after. I said to myself, make more issues. I made a whopping 10 issues the next day and the day after that. I then received a Discord DM from a then-issue opener like me to stop spamming issues, and I seemed to limit myself from then on. Looking at old issues, I shouldn’t have used a temporary image service puush. Now most of my past issues have a blank void :(

I made my very first PR on the website about a week later. It was just string modifications. To this day, I haven’t made a working development environment with web, and I went on contributing to other projects osu! had in store after I couldn’t find any more issues on web. First was the game, and second, was the wiki.

The wiki was where I was contributing for 2018-2019. I was mostly reviewing (with nitpicks) and helped made a consistent formatting article of the markdown (known as the ASC). I stopped contributing as I felt I couldn’t do anything else / was inefficient with the manual process. Since I left, there have been automated tools and CI made by the current contributors.

Around the time I was on the wiki, I also contributed to the game at a lower rate. My first PR was a mess. I wasn’t even using an IDE. After I knew my mistakes, I fired up the really bloated Visual Studio at the time, and I had a slow computer at the time. I then switched to VSCode. I was increasingly contributing here. In 2020, or three years ago, I got a community contributor badge. I believe I was done, but I just continued fixing the game as much as I can. I only recently switched to Rider in 2021. It was a huge jump to whatever I was using.

History aside, I gained a ton of experience. I didn’t code before this, but I had a yearning to fix things myself. I knew of osu! from a sibling and initially saw no interest. I was probably invested in some other game (Pokemon). I became interested when I played it more and noticed that it was open-source and needed some work. Working with the game you like really is something.

Thanks to everyone that helped me with this journey. Most notably, thank you peppy for making osu!, bdach for reviewing my pull requests, and MegaApplePi (if you’re still there) for making open-source initially less scary.