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Background

I recently left my first ever software engineering job at Backstage.Army, a nice product for all you creators out there. While I was there I encountered a bunch of new things about Product Engineering & working within a team in general, This issue lists down a brief version of what I learned. I hope this helps folks new to the industry, or anyone. Note that all of them were my learnings, and some lessons might only apply to startups.

Lessons

1. Please Help!

I see a lot of folks wandering over the internet asking how to contribute to open-source, To my disappointment none of the articles, I have read mention what actionable steps should be taken to make your first-time contrib.

Although I see people giving one generic advice like, "choose a package you already work with and contribute there", this still doesn't solve your problem because you might be using packages that are too big, working with these big projects can be sort of overwhelming. So to make it easier I am gonna share one secret cheat trick with you that is everlasting

Secret 🤫

I wanna tell you that you need to stop being guilty of not actively working on side-projects. Don't take this in the negative way of not doing any projects at all but if you have been beating yourself for not being good at it, I am here to assure you that it's fucking okay!!

Building side-projects is hard, there are 2 sides to the coin.

1. Finding a problem to fix and start building the solution.
2. Keeping up the momentum and maintaining it for a long-time.

Both of these sides are equally hard to achieve. But once you have a solution to a legit problem, all of the below monsters can come up anytime during the process, leading you to give up on your project midway.