I was able to contribute to an open source project from the open food foundation.  My initial contribution consisted of a single addition to their README that corrected an issue a few of us encounted during the process of setting up our environments for the project.  I initially wanted to add this information directly into the README, but another contributor noted that the wiki would be a better place for it.  Since I wasn't aware of the wiki, I discussed this idea with several members of the team and agreed to add a link to the wiki in the setup instructions.

It was a different experience from working on my solo projects since I needed to get buy in from some of the maintainers on this project.  This proved to be a lot different than my personal projects, since I couldn't be the sole decider.  In the end, I think we arrived at a much better solution for where to place that info than the one I initially had, so I think it was great overall.

For the second contribution, Aaron and I paired on a ticket related to some odd behavior related to a button. There was a button to submit new customer info after editing it, but the button was appearing as disabled when a tag was deleted, even though the area had been changed.  The issue was labelled as "beginner friendly" and "ruby", so we thought we would be able to figure it out since we had a good background in ruby.

It turned out to be an issue that required us to look through HAML, coffeescript, and angular logic (none of these which we knew anything about).  Aaron and I have a pretty good flow when it comes to pair programming, so (with a lot of profanity directed at the various JS frameworks that exist) we were able to slowly figure out how this feature worked.  Even though we didn't know any of these technologies, we were able to follow the various method and function calls to learn how the functionality worked.  Once we had this figured out we had a theory for why the issue was occuring.

We learned about a concept in Angular forms called "dirty".  This basically means that a user has interacted with this form.  The behavior we were seeing was due to the fact that the tag that was being deleted existed independently of the form, so it wasn't actually changing the state of the form.  We were able to remove a conditional statement on the disabled button that seemed to serve no purpose and it fixed the issue.  We aren't positive that it was the correct change, but it may help someone else determine the actual root cause of the bug if it isn't.

Overall, my experience working on the open source project has been fun and it seems a lot less intimidating than I had anticipated it to be.  I think I will find another project I am passionate about to contribute to.