Harsh Vyapari

My First Open Source Contribution

harshvy5094@proton.me (Harsh Vyapari) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Never thought, I’m really gonna write a blog post this soon. Actually, I was busy with contributing some changes to this website template, you can see them here. The feeling of contributing to new projects makes me feel good about myself and also I love the thank you messages I get from the maintainer/owner.

So as I was thinking about what should I write about my first blog site, I thought, why don’t I share my journey as to how I started contributing to open source projects. So, today on this blog post, I’m gonna talk about my first open source contribution I’ve done.

Some long but quick backstory

So after my college graduation, I was job hunting from my home. So I had a lot of free time to tweak, learn new stuff. That’s when I started daily driving Linux (Well, my primary reason was my fucking windows just don’t keep my setting to my preferences and resets it after every update). My first ever distro to install in my computer was debian. Debian was a good and stable distro, but it’s multiple package management, just to get latest updated packages annoyed me, so I shifted to fedora.

While it gets a lot of hate from toxic linux enthusiasts, from my personal experience, fedora is a very good project which is necessary (that’s why Linus Torvalds use it). It provides a perfect middle ground between debian and archlinux.

It just has one problem, nvidia. Since my laptop has Nvidia GTX 1050 Mobile dedicated gpu. I had to jump so much hoops, just enable this drive, and whenever I update my laptop, I had to manually uninstall and reinstall nvidia drivers, so that it doesn’t stuck on boot kernal infinite loop (I remember, how many times I forgot to do that, that I had to reinstall whole fedora setup multiple times, luckily I had a 1 TB seagate hard drive as secondary storage, I always kept my important data here if by any chance this situation arises).

So I wrote my first bash script to tackle this exact same problem. That helped me a lot I say.

Enter `linutil` (Creating my first Pull request)

I used to watch christitus videos and twitch stream. I also saw him building linutil on his twitch streams. Linutil is basically a utility toolbox contains various scripts to make your life easier. I saw and loved this, I thought, instead of keeping my script to myself, I can share it to this utility.

So I created my first pull request (which you can view it here). Let me be brutally honest, my script was a complete mess, I remember how many times I stopped myself submitting this PR, because I was just scared that my PR will be rejected because of how shitty the code was, but I gathered the courage and created the pull request.

To my surprise, the collaborators and contributors were very kind and guided me what I need to fix, how I can improve it, I was very grateful to them that they guided me so much.

After, a while my Pull Request got accepted. Let me tell you, the feeling of getting your work accepted in a project that hundreds not thousands people are gonna use daily is very satisfying.

I thank all the contributors at that time for guiding me and that somehow helped me gained confidence, that I was desperately searching for.

I’m still working on linutil on my free time. Now, I’m their aur package maintainer. A big shoutout to june (aka koibtw) for trusting me with this responsibility, I’d also like to thank chris for creating this tool.

Lessons I’ve learned

The biggest lesson I want you to take from my story is that, sometimes, you need to just start, no matter how messy is your code/life is, it will automatically correct your path and guide you to your destination.

It also made me appreciate the works of maintainers, who voluntarily handles both the projects and their life simultaneously. It made me very considerate, that I should only make meaningful changes, which takes less time of them.

So, we’ve reached the conclusion of this blog, thanks for taking your time reading my yapping, and you can mail me to give me some feedbacks, I’d love to hear it.

~ Harsh Vyapari ✌️

Why I Decided to Move to Hugo

harshvy5094@proton.me (Harsh Vyapari) — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:57:26 +0530

So, Why am I doing this?

As you know my old website was just nothing but a single index.html with style.css. Shoutout to bashbunni for that.

As you can see, it’s a simple website, It served me well, but I think it’s time to retire this buddy.

Now, what should I choose?

I wanted to dip my toes with blogging, technical writing. For that I wanted a website template with minimal design and flexibility to modify it on my preferences, I also wanted to use a static site generator. For a while, I’ve heard that they are easy to maintain, and let’s you focus on your writing.

I was surfing the web, that’s when I stumble upon Srirang’s site and just fell love with the. When I further researched about that, I found that he was using hugo with hugo-blog-awesome. The template was so minimal, easy to maintain and had the flexibility that I was desperately searching for. So I decided to use this template as my new blog website.

Needed some help, `Opencode` to the rescue

So first of all, I’m not familiar with neither go, nor hugo. So I started reading the docs, (Honestly, I wanted to quickly start my writing). So the next thing I did, I started used opencode. The model I used for this is MinMax M4, which surprisingly a very powerful model. It helped me a lot while setting up this hugo site.

Next thing I wanted to setup is my custom colors for dark and light theme. I know, I know you people are gonna ask me, “Why the hell are you changing the colors? It looks so beautiful.” and you are correct my friends. The colors look beautiful, but my heart is already belongs to gruvbox (Why the hell then I’ll change my old site colors to match gruvbox).

So I searched in the repository how I can change the colors of this site and stumble upon this discussion. It was just to add themes/hugo-blog-awesome/assets/sass/main.scss to root directory and replace the colors with what I wanted. It’s that simple! So I followed the exact same step, fired up opencode again to replace colors to gruvbox palette (Admit it, no one is going to write hex value when you have AI assistant), and voila! My colors are perfectly matching with gruvbox colorscheme. I’m gonna tweak the themes and template in the future, I’m satisfied for now with how my website turned out.

So this is how I decided, on a whim evening, on my sleep time to update my website. I’m gonna write more soon so stay tuned!

~ Harsh Vyapari ✌️

About

harshvy5094@proton.me (Harsh Vyapari) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Namaste 🙏, My name is Harsh Vyapari. I’m just a simple computer nerd who loves FOSS and open source. My current daily driver operating system is archlinux with my custom hyprland config.

Some of the things I’ve done as open source contributor is written below:

I work on linutil as a contributor on my free time. I’m also responsible for maintaining their aur packages.

I’m a big Japanese animation movie lover with Studio Ghibli films being my favorite. Some of my favorite are, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Only Yesterday, The Wind Rises, Graveyard Fireflies.

I’m gonna update this list in the future

I’m also an avid music lover. Some of my genres I listen to are J-pop, Qawalli and some Anime songs or OST.

I go by my alias harshv5094 on the internet.

For my open source contribution verification (commit sign-in), I’ve already posted my gpg sign key to contact section of this website.

Contact

harshvy5094@proton.me (Harsh Vyapari) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m mostly offline, but I popup sometimes in social media, just click available in footer to visit my profile. If you want to have a personal conversation, I’m available through my email id.

harshvy5094@proton.me

Don’t worry it’s still me. I lost my harshv5094 proton mail with recovery code, so I’m stuck with this email address.

I’m also pasting my gpg public sign key so it’s easy for people to verify my contributions.

Public RSA sign key: 525F AC3D 751C F169 E31C 0E43 A897 C10C 48C4 E722