Four years ago today, change set #13446 landed in WordPress core. It was a day that changed my life. The patch landed while I was sitting at Java Shack in Arlington, VA. I went back to my then girlfriend’s place and exclaimed “You won’t really understand this, but I just had a patch added to WordPress”. From that day forward, my code was going to be used by millions of people. Yes, this change wouldn’t affect most of them. It was a small incremental improvement. But it’s small incremental improvements that make good projects great.

My first Code Changes in WordPress

In May, I celebrated WordPress’s 10th Anniversary and noted all the friendships I made because of WordPress. That remains even more true today. I moved to NYC late last year and the person here who I’ve become closest with is someone I first met at a WordCamp. I found my apartment because of a friend that I made at a WordCamp. My involvement with WordPress even got me the job that I have.

WordPress isn’t a perfect project. If It was, I wouldn’t want to work on it as much as I do (that is a somewhat paraphrased quote I originally heard Andrew Nacin say). We have a lot of code to improve. The diversity of our contributor community needs improvement. We also need to do a better job of going outside of our community and bringing others into it. But hopefully in the next four years, I’ll have a chance to help improve all of it.

This coming weekend I’m presenting at WordCamp Lancaster. This is where I proposed the crazy idea of doing back-to-back-to-back lightning talks that are voted upon by the audience. It’s a challenge to myself (which is the theme of my introduction talk). I’ve built a little node app to handle the voting and selecting of my next set of slides for me. This is the first time I’ve been nervous about a presentation this far in advance as far back as I can remember.

There are about 30 tickets remaining right now. You should go and snatch one up before they are all gone. You might just see me make an idiot out of myself.

But that doesn’t happen. There’s always a place to contribute. Nobody comes out to bite when you create a ticket, nobody slaps your code down. In fact, the community loves when a new face appears on Trac with any type of activity.

The patch was eventually committed and I felt amazing. On the contributors list for 3.4!

Freaking stellar.

This is where the train starts moving. Once I was past that hurdle, a whole new world opened up. I wanted to contribute!

via Thoughts on Contributing to WordPress Core | Jeremy Felt.

Great post by Jeremy Felt about his path to contributing to WordPress, joining the community and how you too can do the same.