What Happens After You Submit Your First Pull Requests
A few days ago I submitted 10 pull requests to 7 different open source repos. I’d never done a PR before that day. Today I checked back on all of them and learned that submitting is the easy part. What happens next is where the real lessons are.
The Scorecard
Out of 10 PRs:
- 1 merged (Sentinel-AI, docs cleanup)
- 3 closed without merging
- 6 still waiting
That’s a 25% merge rate on decided PRs. Sounds low but it’s actually normal for someone doing rapid-fire first contributions. Here’s why the three got closed, and what each taught me.
I Built an Open Source Contribution Toolkit in 57 Tokens, Then Submitted 7 PRs in One Session
I’m a beginner programmer. I know what loops do, I can read Python, and I’ve done basic git pushes and pulls. But I’d never submitted a pull request. I didn’t even know what a PR was a few hours ago.
Now I have 7 pull requests across 3 different repos, including a bug fix in a famous 3,259-star chess engine, and a fully tested toolkit that helps anyone find and contribute to open source projects.