Why

Ever since I discovered the concept of open-source projects, I've been eager to contribute to this community. Open-source projects have not only inspired me but also taught me valuable lessons through their code. I've even benefited financially from utilizing them. Now, it's my turn to give back by sharing my own humble project with the community. Although it may be small in scale, I hope that someone in the community can benefit from it, just as I gained knowledge when I first started programming by exploring open-source projects.

What

The project I'd to share is called react-stacked-toast. It is a lightweight, customizable, and user-friendly react component library that allows for easy notification display.

You could learn more about it here

Lessons

Here are some lessons I've learned throughout this journey:

Just do it

I took me nearly 2 years of procrastination before getting VSCode up and running and completing the project, and guest what? I only took me one month to release the very first version of the react-stacked-toast. This experience has taught me that to accomplish something, I must take the first step and be willing to get my hands dirty.

Start small

Although I'm not an overly ambitious person, I intially wanted to build an open-source project that would immediately impress everyone. Howver, I quickly realized that this approach was only causing me to procastinate. To overcome this, I dedcided to take baby steps and start with smaller tasks, gradually familiarizing myself with the process of building an open-source project.

Stay focused on your goal

When I presented my project to a community to gather feedbacks. I received some negative comments that left me feeling discouraged. However, I reminded myself that my goal wasn't necessarily to impress people, but rather to receive feedback. And that's exactly what I got. Regardless of whether the feedback was positive or negative, I accepted it graciously and used it to improve myself.

Don't ignore feedbacks

Ignoring feedback is a surefire way to hinder the improvement of my library. Instead of believing that my work was flawless, I welcomed all types of feedback, knowing that each comment held the potential to enhance the quality of my project.

By embracing these lessons, I've grown as a developer and deepened my understanding of the open-source community. I look forward to contributing to more projects in the future and continuing to learn from this inspiring community of developers.