Contributhon is a 2-month Open Source Bootcamp designed by SheCodeAfrica to pair mentors from different global open source organizations with African women in tech who get to work with them on selected projects within the organization. The participating mentoring organizations for this cohort were CHAOSS, Layer5, Jenkins, Moja Global, and Coil.

After joining Contributhon as a mentee last month, I was assigned to CHAOSS, where I contributed to open source for the first time. CHAOSS is an open source project at the Linux Foundation focused on creating analytics and metrics to help define community health. I worked with a fellow mentee- Iyimide, and three mentors from CHAOSS- Ruth Ikegah, Elizabeth Barron, and Matt Snell. As this cohort of Contributhon comes to an end, I have documented a summary of my activities in the last couple of weeks.

Overview

I worked on the CHAOSS Newcomer Slack Bot Project with Iyimide. Our tasks included:

• Determine the best framework for writing the Slack bot.
• Use CHAOSS’s GitHub repository to host the code for the bot.
• Include tests for the bot, if possible.
• Include comments in the code that will help the next maintainer understand how the bot works.
• Work with mentors at CHAOSS for bot content, and bring your own ideas!
• At the end of the project, document the information for installing, maintaining, adding to bot content, or troubleshooting.

My Contribution

After doing research and testing, and with some guidance from our mentors, we set up the project repo(which we currently still maintain) and set up CI/CD. Afterward, we built and deployed the bot.

• See my pull requests

After completing the initial phase of our project, I focused on writing the documentation

• CHAOSS Slack Bot Documentation

Challenges

I had my doubts about the project initially because it was not something I was familiar with. Also, it was my first time contributing to open-source after several previous attempts which failed because it was all very confusing. However, the team was great. I got (and I'm still getting) all the support and encouragement I needed from my mentors and my co-mentee. Any confusion on my part was quickly cleared up.

Experience gained

Some of the skills/concepts I learned/improved on during this program are:

• Continuous integration/Continuous Deployment
• Unit testing
• Technical writing
• Troubleshooting with Git
• Developer sign-off
• Effective communication

Improvement Suggestions

• This cohort was great, and the next cohort would be even better with more presentations from resourced persons. They were the icing on the cake.

Next Steps

While I am still contributing to CHAOSS, I am also looking out for full-time roles and other Open Source opportunities. I hope to be a Contributhon mentor in the future.

Thank you, SheCodeAfrica 💗.