My journey with Drupal contributions started in Oct 2019 and I started by understanding basic issues and reviewing  patches created by the experienced contributors.  

As we start a New year, I am proud that my contribution has played an important part in moving Unimity to Page one of the Service Providers list. I wish to share in this blog my learnings and I hope that this will inspire organizations and developers to contribute in the new year! 

Five aspects I have learnt through my contributions are:

1. Understanding of  how Drupal software is built

2. Connecting  with core contributors

3. Improving my Technical knowledge

4. Staying up to date with Drupal

5. Mentoring  others

Understanding of  how Drupal software is built:-

Drupal is built from community contributions from all over the world. Lot of hard work by core contributors results with the successful implementation of this open source software. Other aspects about Drupal and the issue queues include:

1. Understanding the  issue workflow from how an issue starts from active to needs work, needs work to needs review and needs review to reviewed & tested by community, RTBC to fixed.
2. The different ingredients of this software include: modules/components, issue queues, core contributors, patches, tags, version control, credits, commits
3. Understanding Drupal’s roadmap and the features mapped to each of the releases
4. Initiative leads & initiative meetings

Connecting  with core contributors:- 

Had the privilege of interacting with top 10 core contributors:  Kjamlaluno, Jrockowitz, RajabNatshah, Volkswagenchick,  Bojanz, Alonaoneill, Thalles, Wim Leers, Webchick, Lauri, Jhodgdon, Xjm and few others.

It was a truly wonderful experience to get appreciated by core Drupal maintainers for my work .
 

Recognized by Alexpott

Recognized by Webchick

Improving my Technical knowledge:-

Drupal Contributions also helped me in gaining the technical knowledge in many areas such as :

1. Drupal’s folder structure
2. Concepts such as Layout Builder, View modes, JSON API, Help topics
3. Front end CSS, JS and TWIG implementations
4. Writing Test Cases
5. Documentations

Staying Up to date with Drupal:-

Drupal Contributions introduced me to Drupal roadmap. Following the roadmap helped me to stay updated with  new features. When Drupal 8.8 was rolled out, I knew about the New Administration Theme Claro and Media Library. I also follow core maintainers on twitter and have recently started working on the new Olivero Theme that Dries spoke at length during his session at DrupalCon Amsterdam.

Mentoring  others:- Contributions improved my role as Drupal Trainer at Unimity. I started being a mentor to all those willing to contribute and give back to Drupal. 

It has been an exciting journey and I thank Unimity for sponsoring the time to contribute. I also want to share few other members at Unimity who have Contributed to Drupal in 2019 are:

1. Gayathri: Contributed in various areas as :- Help Topics , Media Library Documentation, Umami Profile 
2. Madhura: Contributed in areas such as :- Migration, Help_topics
3. Vinodhini:- Contributed in Claro new Admin Theme, Deprecated code
4. Gnanagowthaman:- 
5. Tarun: Contributed in Olivero New Front end theme
6. Iyyappan:- Contributed in Migration
7. Punam:- Contributed in Migration 

Together Unimity contributed: 13 core patches, 3 olivero patches, 1 Claro patches, 38 contributed patches.
I welcome more users from the Drupal community to join and benefit from the contributions.

Are you looking for help to climb the Drupal Contribution ladder? Just reach out to  me "Shimpy" on drupal_ contribute slack channel! Happy to help :)