I grew up in a small town in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh, in a farmer’s family where English was not spoken at home and certainly never read in a textbook with any seriousness. I studied through the Hindi medium all the way up to the twelfth grade. When I decided to prepare for the JEE Advanced engineering entrance exam, an exam taken by over a million students every year, I was not just learning physics and mathematics from scratch. I was learning them in a language I had never used for serious academic work before. Looking back now, I think that eight-month stretch quietly taught me the first lesson of my open source journey, years before I had ever opened GitHub: that being unprepared for the language something is written in is not the same as being unprepared for the thing itself.
Those eight months were, without exaggeration, the hardest of my life up to that point. I had to teach myself an entirely new academic vocabulary in English while my classmates who came from English-medium schools were sprinting ahead. There were nights I genuinely doubted whether I belonged in that race at all. But I cleared JEE Mains with a 97 percentile and JEE Advanced with an All India Rank of around 21,000, and that result got me a seat at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Agartala, a small but rapidly growing technical institute tucked away in India’s northeast, a region most of the country’s own tech ecosystem barely thinks about.
Stumbling Into Open Source
I did not arrive at IIIT Agartala with any plan to contribute to open source software. Honestly, I barely understood what that phrase meant. What changed things was watching my seniors. Some of them had been selected for Google Summer of Code, others for the Linux Foundation’s LFX Mentorship, and others for C4GT, India’s Code for GovTech program. They were not extraordinary in some mythical way. They were students like me, in the same hostel corridors, eating the same mess food, except they had figured out something I had not: that the global software industry has an open front door, and anyone with a laptop and persistence can walk through it.
They pushed me, in the way that good seniors do, somewhere between encouragement and peer pressure, to just try. So I did. My first real entry point was Hacktoberfest, the annual event that nudges developers worldwide to make their first pull requests to open source projects every October. It is, deliberately, a low-stakes on-ramp, and I am grateful it exists, because without it I am not sure I would have had the courage to open my first pull request at all. There is a particular kind of fear in submitting code to a project maintained by strangers on the other side of the world, strangers who will read your work line by line and tell you, often bluntly, what is wrong with it. For someone who had spent his whole academic life translating his own thinking out of Hindi, this was yet another translation: from “I think this code works” to “I can defend why this code works, in English, to someone who has never met me.”
What followed was not a smooth upward climb. It was a string of rejections that, if I am honest, tested my resolve more than JEE ever did. I applied to the Linux Foundation’s LFX Mentorship program and did not get in. I applied to Google Summer of Code and was rejected. I applied to LFX a second time, with what I thought was a much stronger proposal, and was rejected again. Each of these came with that particular ache of having put real effort, real proposal-writing, real conversations with potential mentors, into something that ultimately said no. There is no version of this article where I pretend that did not hurt.
My early contributions were small, but they built the foundation I desperately needed. Soon, I transitioned from those initial Hacktoberfest submissions to contributing to larger, more complex repositories like Joplin and the cloud-native ecosystem with Cilium. In Cilium, I started by tackling UI fixes and performance optimizations, and I still vividly remember the feeling of getting my first major pull requests, including PR #891 and #892, successfully merged. It was no longer just about translating code from my head to the screen; it was about understanding large-scale architectures and proving that my work could hold up in a global ecosystem.
What the Rejections Actually Taught Me
If I had stopped after any one of those rejections, I would not be writing this. What kept me going, I think, was a slow realization that open source does not actually evaluate you the way an exam does. An exam gives you one number, and that number is meant to be final. Open source, by contrast, is closer to a long conversation. Every rejected proposal still left behind code, documentation, and discussion threads that improved a real project used by real people. Every reviewer's comment, however blunt, was a small lesson in how engineers in San Francisco, Berlin, or Bangalore actually think about software, not how a textbook imagines they think.
That difference matters enormously when you are trying to navigate global collaboration from a town most of your collaborators have never heard of. I learned, slowly, that a maintainer in Germany reviewing my pull request at midnight was not cold when their feedback was short and direct. That is simply how a lot of European open source culture communicates: efficiently, with less small talk than I was used to, and with an assumption that directness is a form of respect rather than rudeness. I had to unlearn my instinct to read brevity as disapproval. At the same time, I noticed that maintainers from parts of Southeast Asia or from Indian-led projects tended to soften feedback with more context and encouragement, closer to how conversations happen back home. Neither style is more correct. Learning to read both, and to respond in the register each maintainer expected, became its own quiet curriculum running alongside the actual coding.
Navigating this global collaboration would have been overwhelming without the right guidance. Working closely with project mentors like Bill Mulligan from the Cilium ecosystem and Laurent22 from the Joplin project changed my perspective on what mentorship in open source actually looks like. They showed me that cross-cultural mentorship is not about spoon-feeding answers. It is about pointing you toward the right documentation, giving transparent feedback even when it stings a little, and trusting you to bridge the gap yourself. Interacting with them taught me that despite the geographical distance and the cultural differences, the open source community is fundamentally rooted in a shared willingness to help newcomers succeed.
Eventually, the persistence paid off in a way I had stopped expecting. I was selected for the Linux Foundation’s LiFT Scholarship, which gave me access to professional-grade training and a certification exam I had previously only been able to admire from a distance because of the cost. Around the same time, I was selected to represent at UN Open Source Week, held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, a genuinely surreal thing to process for someone whose first pull request was, not so long ago, a nervous Hacktoberfest submission typed out in a hostel room in Agartala. None of this erased the earlier rejections. If anything, it recontextualized them, less as failures and more as the entry fee for everything that came after.
India and Europe: Same Code, Different Conversations
People often ask me, usually fellow Indian students curious about going down the same path, how open source contribution in India compares to what happens in Europe. The honest answer is that the code itself does not know the difference. A pull request is a pull request whether it is filed from Agartala or Amsterdam, and the technical bar for getting merged is, in my experience, identical. What differs is everything around the code.
In India, open source still carries a strong flavor of upward mobility and career strategy. Most Indian contributors I have met, myself included, came to open source through programs like GSoC or LFX precisely because they double as resume-building and as a rare, low-barrier way to work alongside engineers from companies we could otherwise only dream of joining. There is real hunger in the Indian open source community, partly born out of the same competitive academic culture that produces JEE rankings of half a million students.
European open source culture, from what I have observed working with maintainers based there, tends to be less driven by individual career signaling and more shaped by a long institutional history of public-interest software, government-backed digital sovereignty initiatives, and a cultural comfort with treating infrastructure as a kind of commons. Conversations move faster to technical substance and slower to relationship-building small talk. Meetings start on time. Feedback assumes you can take it without cushioning.
The similarity that struck me most, though, is that underneath these different cultural textures, the actual motivation of the people I worked with was nearly identical: a genuine, almost stubborn belief that good software should be built in the open, reviewed by anyone willing to read it, and improved by anyone willing to try. That belief does not need translation. It is the one part of this journey that never once needed eight months of practice in a second language.
I still have a great deal more to do. But the road from a farming family in Mirzapur, through a frightening year of English-medium exam preparation, to a Hacktoberfest pull request, three rejections, a LiFT Scholarship, and a seat at UN Headquarters has taught me that open source’s real gift is not the line on a resume. It is proof, repeated again and again, that the door really is open, even from Agartala.
About the Author
Shivam Pal is a Computer Science undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Information Technology Agartala, India, currently in his second year. He is an active open source contributor to CNCF projects including Cilium, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Meshery, with multiple merged pull requests across these ecosystems. Passionate about cloud-native technologies and developer tooling, Shivam has also contributed to OWASP, AOSSIE, and various LF-affiliated projects. He is currently pursuing Google Summer of Code 2026 and the Linux Foundation LiFT Scholarship, driven by a belief that open source is the future of collaborative innovation.