On August 21st, I received an email from Unicorn Utterances announcing a rebranding. So I went to browse the content and remembered that this team was responsible for one of the most interesting projects I’ve seen in recent months, a digital book that takes you by the hand through the three most important FrontEnd frameworks today, namely: React, Vue and Angular. I’m talking about The Framework Field Guide
Now they were going to call themselves Playful Programming to make a more accessible and easy-to-remember brand with articles for developers of all levels. Quality and free content. My thing. So I went to the blog post to read more and realized that they were inviting the reader to join to the Community Discord. I went in to see what was up and before long Corbin welcomed me and we chatted for a while on the public channel.
I told him that I myself was an Astro enthusiast and had a personal site built using this framework. I plan to use the site as a portfolio and blog. So he invited me to cross-post and translate some Playful Programming materials into Spanish. I thought about it for a moment and remembered that I had often read that contributing to Open Source projects was a good way to make yourself known in the programming community, and that job openings are often found through contacts, so I accepted. I am currently unemployed and only spend my time perfecting my Next.js, learning Three JS and motivating myself enough to exercise so if I had time I told him and let’s go for it.
The next thing I knew, I was on a video call with Corbin, where he showed me the project’s GitHub repository, we installed a GitHub client on my Linux machine, and he walked me through making my first Pull Request with a simple grammar change to one of his Spanish texts. And that was it, since then I’ve been studying the project more, translating some texts into Spanish, and I hope to soon contribute code to this project that I like more and more.
The experience has helped me improve with markdown, and that’s why I decided to take up my personal site again with this blog.