I am now, officially, an open source contributor!

…by which I mean I made a one-character change to fix an off-by-one bug.

Still putting it on my resume.

But really, it’s times like these that I can really appreciate the nature of open-source software. I found this project while I was looking for search-engine image scrapers (for a side project that will eventually be the subject of a blog post). Along the way, I found a number of other projects, and some example code in gists, many of which were clearly influenced or directly forked from the projects that came before them.

And then I came along, saw a tiny issue in this particular project, and fixed it. A couple years from now after this project is abandoned and someone new forks it to get it to work with whatever breaking changes Google made to its search results page, my humble fix will live on.

Not even joking, this is a pretty inspiring moment for me. I always knew contributing to open source projects could be easy, but it was very abstract knowledge. Now I feel that it’s easy, and worthwhile.