Open source in 2nd year — how one merged PR changed my placement interviews

My first open source contribution was a documentation fix. One sentence. I corrected 'it's' to 'its' in a Python library's README. The maintainer merged it within 6 hours and I felt like I had done something significant.

Starting open source is hard in a specific way: the codebase is always bigger than you expect, the setup is always more complicated than the README suggests. The way I got past it: I filtered GitHub issues by the 'good first issue' tag and I only looked at repositories with under 500 stars.

My second contribution was adding a test case to a Node.js date utility library (130 stars, 2 maintainers). The maintainer asked me to add a second test for the edge case. I did. Merged in 3 days.

Here is the placement moment: in my Hexaware campus interview, the interviewer asked me to explain my GitHub profile. I showed him my two merged PRs and talked through the process of reading the existing tests, writing the new test, running it locally, submitting the PR. The conversation went on for 15 minutes.

He later told me in feedback that most candidates from tier-2 colleges list 'open source contribution' on their resume but can't discuss it for more than 2 minutes. The ability to explain a real pull request in detail is rarer than people expect.