Sometime in February, I saw a post from OSCA Fest (Open Source Community Africa) announcing a speaker for the upcoming conference they were hosting in March. She is in the person of Claire Charles. I looked up her profile and one thing stood out for me. She's 13 years and is contributing to Open Source! I decided to learn more about her and highlight all she's doing in Open Source.

Claire is a 13-year-old Nigerian, a web3 developer, technical writer, and an Open Source contributor. She loves writing about her coding journey by sharing what she learns on Hashnode. Outside of tech, she loves purple, cats, and dogs.

She first heard about Open Source on Twitter, so as curious as she was, she inquired about it from her sister. Her sister then referred her to a friend who introduced her and showed her how she can get started with contributing. Afterward, she started with a first-timers community on GitHub. Since then, she's been contributing by fixing bugs and creating issues (connect with her on GitHub here). She's also contributing to Open Source communities by attending meetups, speaking, and editing documentation.

The image above shows Claire attending and speaking at OSCA Fest 2022 which happened in Lagos, Nigeria.

When asked what Open Source meant to her, Claire said;

Open source means an open ecosystem that everyone is welcome to. I see it as a place where everyone gets to contribute and share their ideas.

Claire is an inspiration and I am hoping to use the Everything Open Source platform to highlight more people like her.

Know anyone contributing to Open Source you would like me to highlight, mention them in the comments or send me a dm on Twitter.