How do you know that you are ready to contribute?

Hello everyone 🙂 these days I have fulfilled several personal achievements and they have certainly left me thinking a bit, so I want to share with you the results of my rambling, in addition to responding indirectly to some emails that come to my mailbox from time to time 🙂

We all have a beginning

This is an anecdote that I have already told in my first section, but to this day it continues to impact me in those moments that I take to reflect on my path in software development. When I first had Ubuntu on my laptop, I remember one day being in the library and wanting to update my computer, I had never done it, but I don't know why at that moment I needed it ... I think there was something I wanted to install for a course and it didn't show up in the repositories when it was supposed to be ... I still remember the frustration I felt and the discouragement with which I scrolled through google results lists until I found the solution ... I still had to run the dark and mysterious command:

sudo apt-get update

Obviously in that tutorial I followed the line:

sudo apt-get upgrade

soon after and reading in other places he had even seen:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

but I remember curiously having written:

sudo apt-get update && upgrade

thinking that that way the same thing would be executed 🙂 what times were those ...

We all have more than one beginning

Now inevitably the first moment I heard about Kali Linux comes to my mind, I was certainly in awe of this security, I had read a post that was about decryption of keys for wireless networks, I felt like a hacker at the time of executing john.

Hours passed in the first attempt to discover the key of a WEP network that was in the vicinity of my wifi card ... it took me a long time to discover that the default key lists of john They only had words in English, something that is certainly not very useful in my city, and much less in the vicinity of where I live ...

My first 'hacker' book

I fondly remember my first hacker book, it was certainly a challenge ... first because at that time I was still not used to reading in English, second ... and more importantly, because each line of text seemed to me Chinese mixed with some kind of alien language. For all those who are wondering what book is that ... the answer is here : )

And that was an interesting point in my learning path, because that was the moment when I discovered that I did not like to use Kali Linux without knowing what was happening at every step, it is certainly interesting to run things like nmap or burp or a thousand and one more tools that come by default. I found out that I wanted to know why they worked, and how they did. From that moment on I stopped practicing with Kali's tools and started reading about programming languages.

And we went back to the first moment where everything seemed alien Chinese 🙂 I certainly understood little or nothing of what I was reading, and at the same time it went on and on, devouring information in every corner of the internet as much as possible ... obviously I was worried about getting the best possible source to fill me with information.

Get into the deep

A little time passed and I was already on Gentoo, and I was very curious about many things, and as the days went by I learned a lot about compilation and about construction, and about security, and about many things. But evidently at first, as in all previous experiences, I felt that I was reading alien Chinese.

Why am I counting this?

Well because these days I started sending my first patches (pretty small stuff) to the kernel community, I had heard a long time ago that it was a community of ruthless comments, that it was not the place for a newbie in the FOSS world, that it was very selective with what was applied and do you know what I discovered? which is nothing like that, if you know the rules 🙂

At another time we talked about entering someone else's home, and not respecting the house rules ... obviously it has taken me time to learn these rules, learn to use git well enough to send a patch properly, learn to use a software Static code analysis, learning to review my work carefully, learning to communicate with the community, learning to use vim, learning C ... and yes, at first everything may seem alien Chinese, but as the days go by, all this makes sense and you realize how much you have advanced and how much you have learned.

Today

Today I know more commands and ways of updating a system than I could have imagined, the same thing that today I know and have mastered the collaborative workflow in a community to some extent ... today I read those pages (or even some more complicated ones) and I don't I lose on the way ...

Morning

If we talk about tomorrow ... there is still a lot that I want to learn, I want to know new technologies, I want to master new languages, I want to build new communities, I want to teach more people, and what has happened in every first step of my technological discovery will probably happen ... I'm not going to understand anything at first 🙂 I wanted to get to this with so many words, much is said about the comfort zone, I believe that this is the place where all those who believe that they have mastered something arrive ... because just believing that you have mastered it is certainly reason and reason enough to discover that you are wrong, and that you still have a long way to go. At first you may not understand, you may be wrong, you may even want to throw in the towel, but all that is necessary to never reach the comfort zone, because if you only do what you know, what is more comfortable than that?

I leave this until here because it is only a small opinion ... I do not want you to think that I know more than I actually know, the little I have learned is because I have given myself the job of never being in a comfort zone for long enough to believe that I "master" a topic 🙂 and for those who ask me when they will be ready to collaborate in a project or community, because the answer is simple ...

If you feel ready, you are already late.

Much of the adventure is in discovering things 🙂 if you already know and master everything, everything loses sense 🙂 that is why I enjoy learning about GNU / Linux so much, because it is a world that does not seem to end. It is true that you can dedicate yourself to doing the same job for many days or years without growing, but it is also true that you can do a job without mastering it, but learning a lot every day 🙂 Thanks to those who get here, and greetings and care with your comfort zone