The year was 2020. Like many Linux users, I was deep into distro hopping, tweaking my setup, and slowly shaping my desktop into something that felt truly mine. One small part of that setup was a GNOME extension called Simple Net Speed, which showed my internet speed in the top bar. It worked (mostly). But there was one tiny thing that kept annoying me. The extension updated the speed in UI every 3 seconds. That meant it could show 500 kbps for a while and then suddenly jump to 5 MBps. It was a small issue, but once I noticed it, I could not unsee it. I was completely new to open source at the time, but I did what any frustrated developer eventually does: I opened the code and tried to fix it.
That became my first-ever pull request: change the update interval from 3 seconds to 1 second. A small fix. A tiny change. But for me, it was the beginning. The maintainer didn’t looked over my PR.
So I closed the PR, created a branch called simple-net-speed-simplified, and went all in. In four days, I made 108 commits. Eventually, I realized that the original extension solved the maintainer’s problem, but not necessarily the community’s. So I renamed my version and released it as Net Speed Simplified.
What started as a one-line frustration slowly turned into a full fork. I added more customization, rewrote major parts of the extension, improved the install flow, and kept polishing it based on what users actually wanted. My pull request back to the original project is still open today, with 354 commits. But now, the fork has become its own project.
This journey also became my crash course in open source. One contributor, Mohith from IIT Varanasi, helped rewrite large parts of the codebase into modern JavaScript. That is one of my favorite parts of open source: people from different backgrounds, ages, and experience levels coming together to improve something small but genuinely useful.
Today, both projects continue to exist. The original has around 80 stars and 270K+ downloads. My fork, Net Speed Simplified, has around 130 stars and 208K+ downloads. It may be one of those rare cases where a fork ended up with more stars and almost as many downloads as the original.
In this talk, I will share the story of how a tiny fix born out of frustration became my first GitHub repository, taught me open source, introduced me to community collaboration, and eventually reached more than 200K users.
Target Audience
This talk is for anyone who is curious about getting started with open source, especially beginners, first-time contributors, Linux and GNOME users, and developers who have ever noticed a bug or missing feature in a tool they use but have not yet taken the effort to fix it themselves.
Conclusion
Attendees will leave with one simple idea: you do not need permission, experience, or a grand plan to begin contributing to open source. Sometimes, all it takes is one small frustration, one tiny fix, and the willingness to keep going. That small step can teach you new skills, connect you with people, and open doors you never expected.
