There's no better guide or place to start than just jumping in and making any contribution. My first contribution was adding a Contributors section to someones README.md on GitHub. My second contribution was adding a "Back to the top" button on someone's website. All contributions are good contributions.
Excuse me while I do a little self-promoting here but I do have an OSS project that I would really like to gain some contributors. Express Admin Area is a web GUI for database management. Using Express and React so front and back end devs are both more than welcome to make a contribution. If you're more comfortable on the frontend please.. PLEASE add some CSS to this project. There is also a few Issues that you can take a look at and feel free to open any even if it's just a question.
Now, you probably want bigger and more popular projects to contribute to so go ahead and give Code Triage a look over.
How you specifically contribute is going to change per project. Most mature and popular OSS projects are going to have a Contributing.md file that would walk you through their process and what they expect from a contributor before attempting to make a PR. React Contributing.md.
For my project, Express Admin Area, you'll notice there is no Contributing.md and that's because I don't care. If someone does something blatantly wrong then sure I'll correct them or ask for a fix but it's pretty laid back.
Now if you're wondering about how to get your code into their code base then I would look over How to contribute but the idea is pretty much
Fork OSS repository
Clone the Fork to your machine
Create new branch (typically you wont be making PR's from your Master branch
Make changes & write meaningful commit messages
Push commits to your Fork
Make PR to the original repo
Wait for someone to merge or ask for changes
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There's no better guide or place to start than just jumping in and making any contribution. My first contribution was adding a
Contributors
section to someonesREADME.md
on GitHub. My second contribution was adding a "Back to the top" button on someone's website. All contributions are good contributions.Excuse me while I do a little self-promoting here but I do have an OSS project that I would really like to gain some contributors. Express Admin Area is a web GUI for database management. Using
Express
andReact
so front and back end devs are both more than welcome to make a contribution. If you're more comfortable on the frontend please.. PLEASE add some CSS to this project. There is also a few Issues that you can take a look at and feel free to open any even if it's just a question.Now, you probably want bigger and more popular projects to contribute to so go ahead and give Code Triage a look over.
Awesome. Now, let me ask the even bigger newbie question... HOW do I contribute? I've never worked on a group coding project before.
How you specifically contribute is going to change per project. Most mature and popular OSS projects are going to have a Contributing.md file that would walk you through their process and what they expect from a contributor before attempting to make a PR. React Contributing.md.
For my project, Express Admin Area, you'll notice there is no
Contributing.md
and that's because I don't care. If someone does something blatantly wrong then sure I'll correct them or ask for a fix but it's pretty laid back.Now if you're wondering about how to get your code into their code base then I would look over How to contribute but the idea is pretty much
Master
branch