I flailed for a while before finding a project that I liked. Most of what I saw online was not within my abilities; often I didn’t understand the question, so fixing it was not an option. A lot of the user testing projects required a smartphone, which I do not possess. Based on other students’ posts, I was not alone in feeling unprepared. Eventually, though, I found a good project. It was inspired by Erica’s post about fixing things in the textbook, which I had forgotten was an option.

While doing the reading, I noticed that the em-dash puncuation mark does not translate properly. In my view of the textbook, it shows as a jumble of nonsense characters (—). I decided to see if I could fix it. First, I checked with classmates to make sure that the problem was not limited to my computer (it wasn’t. Thank you, Jasmine). Then I did a little research and found that this issue happens elsewhere; there are several forums with questions about it. I couldn’t find any way to actually make the punctuation work, though; most of the queries had to do with replacing it with something functional. I ended up going through each chapter of the texbook, using the find command with the error characters. It went fairly quickly, and I created a pull request for each chapter where it happened with replacement punctuation.

I had found this project frustrating at the beginning; I felt unable to contribute usefully to anything because I didn’t have the coding skill. This project suited me beautifully because it was essentially copyediting (a skill that I do have). It was a good reminder that all skillsets are useful in different places; the beauty of open source comes from the combination of them.

[Here] (https://github.com/csev/pythonlearn/pulls) are my many pull requests.