Design is a Debugging tool nobody talks about

Most people think open source starts with code. Mine started with design.

Growing up in the hills of Himachal, far from the metropolitan tech hubs, I didn't have the typical path into software. I was an engineering student who got pulled into designing posters for a college clubs, and that one task opened a door I didn't expect. I fell into web design, then UI/UX, teaching myself design principles along the way:

visual hierarchy, user empathy, iteration, and feedback loops. I didn't realize it then, but these were the same principles that would later make me a better open-source contributor.

People told me design doesn't have much of a future, especially for someone headed into backend engineering. They were wrong. Not because I became a designer, but because design trained my eye in ways that code alone never would have.

My first open-source contributions weren't massive features. They were driven by a designer's instinct - a section loading late, an inconsistent layout, a confusing flow. Design taught me to see software from the user's perspective, and that perspective turned out to be exactly what open-source projects needed.

This approach led me to AsyncAPI, where I began contributing meaningfully to the ecosystem. The combination of design sensibility and technical skills helped me stand out, not by writing the most code, but by solving the right problems. Eventually, this led to my selection as a Google Summer of Code 2025 contributor with AsyncAPI.

Today, I work as a Dev-Ex engineer and that "useless" design skill still shapes how I build software every day.

1. How to contribute to open design
2. How a design eye helps you spot contributions that others scroll past, even in backend-heavy projects
3. How the skill people told me to drop became my biggest edge in open source
4. Why the thing you learn from the least expected place might be the thing that sets you apart the most