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Open source contribution for beginners?!

corey rodgers on January 17, 2019

Hi! I'm an amateur developer looking for a starting point to begin contributing to open source projects, I have a reasonable understanding of OOP ...
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Derek Hopper

Are there any open source projects you use in any of the work you do? That's a good place to start. Occasionally, I'll look at dependencies in projects I'm working on and see if they have any issues I could help with. It's a good way to give back.

Also, contributions don't need to be large or complex. I've made contributions where the only thing I helped with is to fix some spelling mistakes or fix typos in documentation.

Some general advice when you want to make a contribution:

  • Start by thanking the author(s) of the project. It always helps to be nice.
  • Read their contribution guidelines. Most projects have one. For example, some projects don't accept new features.
  • If you're unsure if they'd accept a change, open an issue and propose your change. Ask them if it's something they'd be interested in.
  • If you find a bug, submitting an issue with a failing test case helps. Then if they ask if you have time to fix it, you're already on your way.
  • Try to be available to communicate in a somewhat timely manner. Sometimes a pull request might go back and forth through a few rounds of changes. Timely communication helps and makes the process easier for everyone.
  • Follow the conventions laid out by the project. If they write tests a certain way, try to follow that instead of your own style.
  • When you open a pull request, try to explain as much as possible. If the project has a pull request template, follow that.
  • In general, be nice and easy to work with. No open source maintainer is going to get mad at you for being nice.

Good luck! Contributing to open source is a worthwhile endeavor. If you make it something you do regularly, you'll have a handful of contributions one day.

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Isabel Costa

These are really good recommendations 🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾

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James Perkins

I will have work in the next month of two for beginners, I am currently working on document the procedure for fixes.

you can look at this:

github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beg...

Thats a great list.

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corey rodgers

That would be great if we could keep in touch regarding it?

I'll check out the list now thanks for the link!

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James Perkins

I will DM you / message you on Dev when its ready or keep and eye on the posts regarding who has open source contributions. Good luck for now

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Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦

MDN!!!

Make some contributions to docs and you'll

  • learn web APIs
  • learn github etiquette
  • help others
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lepinekong

Well when I tried look at Opensource (like for React), typical instructions are

  1. Fork the repo
  2. npm install

And so what's Next??? :D

Now I understand, it's a lot of work. So hope to do better for my future opensource project at grafcet.online: I'll document every program with diagrams made with herself so that even absolute beginners can understand all the code without spending weeks trying to decipher the maze ;) In fact that's of the very purpose of this tool. I'll also use it to document other Opensource projects.

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Esteban Hernández

You can try increasing test coverage and upgrading outdated dependencies on a library or tool you are familiar with. Maintainers are usually open to these less obtrusive contributions.

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Kyle Boe • Edited
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Jess Lee

Not sure how many of these projects are beginner friendly, but there could be something here for you:

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lepinekong

Yeah that's helpfull, will probably use it when I'll be ready in a few months :)

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corey rodgers

?