At first I tried to find projects by searching open source projects in languages that I already know, I found a lot of projects really interesting like tools for literally everything you could do on a computer or a map of current danger zones in Ukraine by scrapping twitter data, but they always were inactive or the issues were too complicated for me.
I finally started searching directly by issues and language on Github, and finally found a nice project which is an programming association who learn people to code.
They have a website that they want to enhance and they had several issues open to first contributors to improve some points of the code and since the project team looked active and nice I decided to work on this one.
## Project in itself
The association goal is to teach everyone to program. Here the project is the frontend of the website, which contains the whole website. The site exists since Dec 5, 2021 and has recently been updated from react to Gatsby, which is a react framework.
### Contributing
The installation was pretty easy since it is basically reactJs code and I already had the environment prepared for that, I had to install additional packages and the project was running well on my computer.
To contribute to the project you have to fork it, and then go to issues and select one that you want to work on. When you chose an issue you ask to get it assigned and in one or two days they will assign it to you, when you are done you do a pull request on the project to merge your update/fix and you're done.
The owners are very nice and they are responding fast since, I had great exchanges with one of them, William-McGonagle, you can read it [on this issue](https://github.com/fairfield-programming/fairfield-programming.github.io/issues/29)
### The contribution
The issue I decided to work on was the issue ```Change all <img> to Gatsby Images for Better Performance #29``` that you can find [here](https://github.com/fairfield-programming/fairfield-programming.github.io/issues/29).
At first I thought that I would only have to switch jsx tags to GatsbyImages but it turns out that the change that they wanted was not really adapted to their code architecture so I had to learn GraphQL to workaround.
After a few hours on this issue I managed to do what was asked on the issue but I discussed with one of the project owners and we agreed on the fact that the plugin was not made to work great with their project.
My pull request was still accepted but modified by William.
## Conclusion
I'm pretty happy with this project, I didn't realize the impact of open-source before I started searching for an interesting issue and I'm really interested of working on other open source projects. It is really rewarding to help people doing things they like, even more when the project touches you.
I also learned a new side of ReactJs, which I like.
