There's a moment every developer remembers. The moment you click "Create Pull Request" on a repo with thousands of stars, knowing that maintainers — people you look up to — are going to read your code, line by line.
That was me.
Finding the courage
I'd been contributing to open source for a while. Small stuff — documentation fixes, typo corrections, nothing that would make my heart race. But I wanted more. I wanted to actually build something in a real project.
Then I found an issue in Google's Gemini CLI. It wasn't trivial. It required understanding the codebase, the architecture, and the conventions. I spent days reading code before writing a single line.
The PR
When I finally pushed my branch and opened the pull request, I triple-checked everything. The commit message. The description. The formatting. I even re-read the contributing guidelines twice.
Then I clicked the button.
And waited.
The review
The review came faster than I expected. Comments, suggestions, a request for changes. Not harsh — professional. The kind of feedback that makes you better.
I iterated. Fixed things. Pushed again.
And then one morning, I saw it: Merged.
My name. In Google's Gemini CLI. A small commit in a huge repo — but mine.
And then HyperSwitch
That first merge gave me confidence. So when I spotted an opportunity in Juspay's HyperSwitch — an open-source payment orchestration platform — I went for it. Different codebase, different language, different scale. But the fear was less this time.
The PR got approved. Merged.
What it taught me
Contributing to open source at that level isn't about writing perfect code. It's about having the courage to put your work in front of people who are better than you and being okay with the feedback.
The first commit is always the hardest. After that, you realize: these are just people. They want you to succeed too.
My name is in there now. And that still feels surreal.