My first Open Source contribution

Finally, I am writing this article after much procrastination. I have had a lot on my desk, which is why I have been procrastinating.

As one of the mentors at the Technical Writing Mentorship Program (TWMP), I volunteered to be part of the migration team as the program wanted to migrate its documentation from Hugo to Docusaurus. I was excited about this project, hence my willingness to volunteer.

When the project lead (Prince Onyeanuna and Wisdom Nwokocha) at the TWMP brought out the Plan for the migration, I was given a position that I never thought of when I joined. I was made the team lead for the HomePage redesign. Now, apart from being my first open-source contribution and documentation migration, it was also the first time I led a documentation migration team.

In my team, I had two fantastic teammates: Edun Rilwan and Peace Sandy, and together, we created this beautiful homepage.

Fig 1: TWMP new home page

How did we do it?

As the team lead, most of the responsibility fell to me, and since it was my first time leading a project like this, it was the perfect opportunity to learn on the job.

When I was appointed team lead for the home page redesign on April 21, 2025, I had to organise my team, and we held a series of meetings to discuss how to accomplish our tasks.

Fig 2: HomePage team members meeting on Google Meet

Here is how we did it.

1.) We created a Canva Design, which served as a blueprint for building our home page.

Here is the URL to view the design: https://twmp.my.canva.site/

2.) We divided the page into two sections, one for each person. Peace handled the first two sections (the hero section), I handled the following two sections (“hands-on courses” and “check our blog”) while Edun handled the last two sections (“Testimonial” and the “footer” sections)

3.) When we're done working, my team members all push their changes to their respective branches. Peace and Edun created their branch where they worked on and pushed their changes to, while I created the team branch, where I worked on and accepted my team member's pull request and merged it to the Homepage branch.

4.) When my team members were done, I made sure to cross-check everything and that they were working as intended, before I sent a PR to Prince Onyeanuna.

The whole process looks simple and easy as I write it, but it wasn’t so simple because we faced many challenges.

1.) Initially, we planned to use TailwindCSS for the project. However, despite following the documentation carefully, we couldn’t get it to initialize successfully. After multiple attempts, we decided to switch to Vanilla CSS to complete the task.

2.) As expected with most collaborative development projects, we also encountered merge conflicts—because there’s rarely open source without them. Our major challenge was a dependency conflict involving the yarn.lock file. Despite several attempts to resolve the issue, nothing worked. Eventually, we deleted the file from the branch and reinstalled all dependencies using NPM. This allowed us to move forward with the project smoothly.

Despite all the struggles and hurdles, we were able to come up with a good work, and the project leads, Prince Onyeanuna and Wisdom Nwokocha commended us for a job well done.

Here is a pic of the old docs home page and the new docs homepage

Fig 3: The old docs home page at Hugo

Fig 4: The new docs home page at Docusaurus

What I learnt as the Team lead

1. Communication between the team lead and the project lead is as important as communication between the team lead and the team members.

2. My knowledge about git improves: Been able to manage branches, handle Merge conflicts, and review pull requests made me understand Git more.

3. Patience and empathy when dealing with your colleague

4. Deadline management.

What's next for me?

We’re in phase 2 of our documentation, which focuses on restoring removed content, enhancing interactivity, and refining the overall documentation experience.

It has been a learning experience so far, and I am grateful to my team members (Peace and Edun) and the Technical Writing Mentorship Program for this experience.

Thank you for reading this far