13th November the date which is already special to me as it is my birthday became more special as in 2019 I also became GDE for Angular. Many developers and friends asked me to write about my journey to GDE so here it is.

Introduction

If you think if I always wanted to be GDE, let me tell you when I started contributing to Angular and NgRx, I was not even aware of what GDE means. My only focus was to contribute to NgRx and Angular, and how that started well I have already written how my first conference changed my life. Below is my blog post on How I started my Open Source Journey.

My Open Source Journey
_Hello everyone, my name is Santosh Yadav and I want to share my Open Source journey with everyone. I am working as a…_dev.to

The first time I heard about GDE was when Pankaj Parkar became one, and I felt really proud as I got to see him at my first conference a month ago.

And once I saw this, I went to Google and searched what we mean by GDE, again just to check what it means. It was never in my mind to become one. I kept contributing to the Angular Eco-system. Until one day I was nominated by Siddhant from the Google Dev Rel team here in India.

Below are a few things which I did before I got nominated:

• Attended my first conference in 2019
• Contributed to NgRx
• Started writing blog posts for Angular In Depth
• Started a meetup in Pune
• Speaker at Webstackup Pune
• Speaker for Javascript and Friends (remote)
• Contributed to Angular and moved into the top 100 contributors globally
• Built angular-builders.dev for the community
• Built ng deploy builder for Netlify
• Speaker at ng-SriLanka 2019

Conclusion

Many developers asked me they have never contributed to Open Source, can we become GDE, well Stack Overflow is one of the platforms where you can contribute as well. Few of my friends from Angular Community, and they are also GDE contribute via Stack Overflow. You have to decide how you want to play your part in the community. You can also arrange conferences, write blog posts they are also a way to help the community.

If you need more help you can always connect to me on twitter, my handle is santosh1974221 feel free to send DM.