My First Patch Was Accepted!

I’m a little excited today as my first patch (and first ticket even!) has been accepted. And it really didn’t take very long either. Less than 24 hours after I had submitted my first patch, I got my contribution added. I did have to submit to more variations of the patch though as my first one wasn’t quite right. I wanted to give a shout out to Brian Curtin and Eli Bendersky who helped me figure all this stuff out and made my first foray into core Python development a success. Personally, I think it would have been a success even if the patch wasn’t accepted as I still learned a lot along the way.

Things to take away from the experience:

• Try to stay on topic! I actually found a second issue with the paragraph I was fixing in the devguide and that probably should have gone in a separate bug report.
• Number your patches! I don’t know why I didn’t think of that, but Eli told me I should do that in the future to make it less confusing for the committer. That was a face palm moment.

I’ve been reading some of the supposedly “easy bugs” and trying to figure out where else I can help. I already spotted another typo in the docs that are included with Python itself which I’ll probably try to fix. Of course, I want to actually contribute to the code, not just the documentation, but I am probably more likely to be able to find documentation bugs I can help with. Hopefully with more experience I’ll be able to contribute more effectively. Happy hacking my fellow Pythoneers!