Young developers often fret at the idea of contributing to an open-source project, but it’s actually easier than one might think. Plus, by doing so we learn a lot about how “the big boys” handle their code, as these projects tend to have thousands of contributors that somehow must work in unison to keep the project alive and with little to no errors at all times. Sometimes coding isn’t even required, as some tasks require UI/UX skills or improving existing documentation. There are many places to start and most open source projects will be excited to welcome your work to their codebase.
Get talking!
Open-source projects are special because its collaborators tend to do it with a particular degree of care and finesse. Additionally most software that we use today is open source. In the early stages of modern computing, source code was handled like a commodity; and while it still is, the industry gurus realized that the tools to build more software should be for anyone to take and experiment with.
For instance, Linux is one of the largest and most important open-source projects to ever exist. It has hundreds of thousands of collaborators throughout the world and it hasn’t stopped attracting new talent. How is this possible? By building a community. We are talking about real people behind all this code. Get talking, join forums and introduce yourself. Just the willingness to learn and give out a hand should be enough to get some attention in the open-source community because that’s exactly the intended purpose: The idea of working towards something larger than yourself.
Don’t wait, start to look.
There are so many projects you can work on that it’s surprising. You can look up the Github repositories for Firefox, Android, freeCodeCamp, edX… Try to filter down your search results! There’s a trending page in Github where you can filter by language.
Make it fun! Is there a language that you wish to practice on? Or a project that you’ve always liked and perhaps you’d love to be a part of? Make it your own project to be a part of another project. It’s certainly rewarding to have your code running in thousands of computers worldwide, even if it’s just a tiny fix to get rid of a DeprecationWarning. It all counts.
Look for incentives, contests, bragging rights
Maybe it’s not the right approach, but all developers know that contributing to a large open-source project is sort of a badge of honor. There are also contests, such as Digital Ocean’s Hacktoberfest, where 4 pull requests will reward you with a nice shirt among other types of souvenirs.
There’s plenty of information on contributing to open-source and it’s only going to get more popular. On FirstTimersOnly there are dozens of links and projects that are looking for enthusiastic collaborators. At UpForGrabs you can filter projects by programming language and see their descriptions; or maybe even post your own code!.
Most importantly, you’ll outdo yourself
Without a doubt, the best thing you can get from contributing to open source is experience. It will help you go further in your career as a developer and it will teach you about how the big guys handle their code and synchronize thousands of programmers from different time zones, where oftentimes the main way of communication is only through tickets, forums, chat rooms and PRs.
And last but not least, you’ll learn quite a bit about CI/CD tools and version control (Github, most likely), both of which are very valuable assets for the modern software engineer. So don’t be afraid, but instead get excited and start launching some PRs!.
Source: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-definitive-guide-to-contributing-to-open-source-900d5f9f2282/
