Hey guys out there! If you are like me you are using most of your time coding some bits of OSS. Have you ever thought about contributing to some of...
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I run an Open Source workshop, where attendees get guided help finding and submitting PRs. So far almost 100 people have attended 4 workshops. Attendees have successfully contributed to countless projects in the NodeJS, Ruby and Python ecosystems.
I've personally contributed to dozens of '10K+ Star' GitHub projects across many languages. JS, Ruby, Shell, Go, etc. Also I've written plenty of examples & fixes on Mozilla's MDN site.
The secret is: next time you find something broken, fix it. Next time a README lacked sufficient examples, causing you to reach for a new google search... Go back and fix it once you find the missing piece!
Specifically, copy-and-paste it in the place that would have made your experience easier.
I'm talking about documentation, as it's a great place to start. It's low commitment, high impact.
For example, a single-line commit I landed in the
React Routerdocs changed the default home page content - I didn't write a line of content, yet potentially helped thousands of devs. I simply helped connect the dots for future devs. This led to a few increasingly substantial contributions, and a shout-out from one of the projects co-creators on twitter.This is a clear demonstration of one of the biggest & most overlooked benefits: building out your network.
My approach doesn't focus on being an active contributor to Open Source, rather I contribute fixes back to the community as I encounter unresolved bugs with the dependencies I'm using. Instead of superficially solving the problem within my application code, I would acquaint myself with the code running the dependency, make the correction, and submit that fix back to the community.
Worth noting with the open source community: You're going to have expectations, and then there's going to be the reality for each project. Some projects might align with your expectations for collaboration, and some are going to feel like a ghost town when you try to contribute. In 2017, I submitted a fix to a critical (breaking) defect for an MDM plugin that Oracle authored. They never looked at the PR, and they haven't pushed any new releases to address the bug.
Yeah, not even rejected pull requests are a bummer!
Well often a proper bug report is even harder then the resulting fix ;).