A few months ago I contributed to an open-source project for the first time. This was an exciting moment for me. Until recently, I had always borrowed knowledge from blogging gurus such as Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman, and open source repositories such as Code Project and SourceForge. This world of programming was, and still is, a great well of programming tips and tricks that help me out quite regularly.
As I developed the framework for Notes on Code, I started using the CSS Friendly Control Adapters, an open source library available on CodePlex.com. These control adapters improve the quality of ASP.NET page markup by reducing the frequency of <table> objects on the page when rendering complex controls such as the TreeView.
On my pages, I kept a small link to W3C to verify that my XHTML was correct. What to my surprise when I found that it was not. The culprit turned out to be the control adapters, which injected a <link> tag in the <body> section. After searching Google for some time, it became clear to me that this was an unidentified bug.
It was a simple fix, really. It only took a moment to find the offending lines in the source code and, due to the quality design of the original product, find a suitable alternative.
I was very impressed with the management of the project by bdemarzo. By the evening of the same day, the source code for the project was updated to include the changes.
I'll say that it felt like a rite of passage for me. I felt like I had something to contribute to the community, however small that contribution might be. If you haven't tried it yet, go for it. Go anywhere there is code and try it out.
Happy Coding!