Stylex: A Contributor’s Story with Onur Temiz

In our A Contributor’s Story series, our major open source contributors and community members give us insight into the projects they are working on, the successes and challenges contributors face when developing, and best practices for getting started in open source. For today’s blog post, we have Onur Temiz, a Stylex contributor working on issues and code efficiency through the MLH Fellowship. Let’s learn from them how we can start contributing to Stylex.

“I am excited each day to work on such an amazing and impactful project, Stylex, and work with passionate Fellows to grow together.”

Tell us a little bit about yourself

I am a self-taught developer specialized in JavaScript and React.

What excites you to work on open source?

What excites me about open source is being able to see experienced developers' code, learn from them, and use the libraries they created.

What project are you working on currently?

The project I’m currently working on is Stylex.

How did you first learn about this project? What steps did you take to start working on this project?

I first saw Stylex when the MLH open source projects were listed. As it was still a private project, I had no chance of seeing it before.

Did you face any challenges or roadblocks along the way? How did you go about solving them?

I had always used open source projects but never contributed to one. Learning what counts as contribution and how to contribute correctly was an issue at the beginning. I sought help from both my mentor and my maintainer to make my mind crystal clear.

What resources did you find most helpful when working on your project?

Talking with my mentor and maintainer was a great way to understand what I was working on. Other than that, reading the documentation of the libraries that Stylex uses was also helpful.

What is the current status of development for this project?

I am not directly improving Stylex but making it usable for people. I wrote a Next.js plugin and converted Flow types to Typescript types. Currently, I am trying to make ESLlint smarter.

Reflecting on the work that you did, what did you learn about the project, process of development and open source as a whole?

I learned that writing a CSS-in-JS library is hard. The time spent on even a single change might take a while when working on an open source project. However, constant collaboration makes you a better programmer day by day.

What is the best takeaway you have from working on this project and open source in general?

Learning the fundamental technologies such as WebPack or Babel is crucial if you want to contribute to the most popular open source projects.

What advice would you give to future contributors to the open source projects?

Take it slow, and do not try to contribute right away. Spend your initial time understanding the codebase thoroughly. Start with small contributions and bump up as the days go.

We would like to thank Onur for taking time to share their experiences with us. It was very interesting to learn about the process of contributing to open source and we would like to thank Onur for their continuous contributions to the Meta Open Source ecosystem. If you’re interested to learn more about Onur’s work, follow them on LinkedIn and GitHub.

About A Contributor’s Story series

Open source at Meta is about more than just code. It's also about facilitating environments where collaborators from all backgrounds and experiences can come together to discuss ideas, foster innovation, and work on projects together.

This blog is a part of A Contributor’s Story series where we hear from various contributors about their experiences contributing to the open source projects under the Meta Open Source ecosystem, how to get started, the challenges and successes faced when developing, and what excites them about open source. Look out for more blogs from A Contributor’s Story series where we learn about various other open source projects and how to start contributing to them.

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