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.
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 ;).