DEV Community

Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

Posted on

How I Became a React Contributor Four Years Ago

This is the official repo for the React...

GitHub logo facebook / react

The library for web and native user interfaces.

React · GitHub license npm version CircleCI Status PRs Welcome

React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

  • Declarative: React makes it painless to create interactive UIs. Design simple views for each state in your application, and React will efficiently update and render just the right components when your data changes. Declarative views make your code more predictable, simpler to understand, and easier to debug.
  • Component-Based: Build encapsulated components that manage their own state, then compose them to make complex UIs. Since component logic is written in JavaScript instead of templates, you can easily pass rich data through your app and keep the state out of the DOM.
  • Learn Once, Write Anywhere: We don't make assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, so you can develop new features in React without rewriting existing code. React can also render on the server using Node and power mobile apps using React Native.

Learn how to use React

It's pretty popular...

Alt Text

There are 1,339 total contributors to this project. That's a lot of people. But it's also relatively few compared to its impact.

One of those contributors is me! 😱

I have a single merged pull request from four years ago...

Updated conference page #5287

Added Reactive 2015 and React Europe 2016 so that there are some upcoming conferences on the page.

There it is in all its glory. Back then that one repo also housed the React website, and I updated the static calendar with a few new upcoming events.

Here is my code contribution...

Alt Text

Anyone can contribute to open source. Even though my contribution was minor, it helped a bit and I felt really proud of myself being listed as a contributor in this project.

Happy coding!

Top comments (9)

Collapse
 
steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao

I think the core was just contributing even documentations helps a lot for open source projects.

For me, I contributed last year on the python guides in freecodecamp.

It really breaks my notion of open source that you need to be super badass in coding to contribute to an open-source project.

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

The dev.to documentation is so much better than when we first went open source and a huge part of that is the community.

Collapse
 
steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao

That's great I shall take a look at the dev.to documentation and codebase to see where I could help during the hacktoberfest then.

Collapse
 
thefern profile image
Fernando B 🚀

I started contributing last year. Needed to use a java library on Java 7, and the author was very welcoming even helped me since I didn't know much about non blocking code. Now that I think about it, ever since I've contributed tons to multiple repos. 😁

Collapse
 
molly profile image
Molly Struve (she/her)

README updates are way more valuable than I think people give them credit for. Adding a simple line of documentation or even an event date such as this can save many people a lot of Googling, confusion, and frustration.

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Absolutely. A lot of READMEs are missing the helpful snippets around installation that can really fill in gaps for folks that are not super familiar with the environment.

I remember when I was just starting out with Ruby and I didn't quite understand how installing gems worked, it really helped when README was super explicit, even if the step by step could be inferred by anyone with more experience.

Newbies are sometimes best capable of identifying these hiccups.

Collapse
 
miku86 profile image
miku86

Great work!

I'm one of the maintainers of the React Documentation in German.

I learned a lot by having a look at the workflows, the automated stuff etc.

Collapse
 
pancy profile image
Pan Chasinga

Gosh @ben thanks for being transparent and open. This helps set new belief in how devs think about OSS contribution.

Collapse
 
bastorx profile image
Bastien Chevallier

Then I'm a TypeScript contributor ☕