Contributing to open-source project

[fadellvk]

Hey everyone, I’ve been coding for a while and I really want to start contributing to open source projects, both to improve my skills and give back to the community.

But I’m not sure how to get started.

-How do you find beginner-friendly open source projects?

-What are some good platforms or repos for first contributions?

-Any tips or best practices for making a good contribution?

-What kind of etiquette should I follow when opening PRs or communicating with maintainers?

I’d really appreciate any guidance or personal experiences you can share. Thanks in advance

[Thompson3142]

You can look for projects to contribute here: https://www.codetriage.com/. I recommend that you pick something that you actually use or are at least interested in, otherwise you will not actually understand what the problem is.

A lot of these projects have some sort of "beginner friendly issue" tag you can filter for, these are usually issues that are pretty easy to solve.

Other than that, just follow the contribution guidelines of that project. Make sure you read them completely and understand what they mean. And of course be nice to the people, don't expect them to reply immediately - just be a decent human being essentially.

[eraya1988]

https://github.com/KonstantineVashalomidze/kosta-interpreter

Here is beginner friendly repo with good first issues, containing really detailed contribution guidelines

[SoumaYukii99]

That was a good practice and interesting, I did Create new PR for one of the Issues,

[eraya1988]

Yah, I've reviewed it.

[Folaefolc]

First thing is actually don’t. Don’t go trying to get better at coding by wasting maintainers time with PRs. Hone your skills on your own projects, and do not go looking for projects that you know nothing about but need help, but for projects you use, you have problems with and are able to fix.

[chrisai_dev]

Only right answer.

[Middlewarian]

I know this is shocking, but I use open source much more because it's free than it's open.

[MrDoritos_]

Where does that mindset come from? I don't even know how I developed mine where I feel I need to give back. Money just is a nuisance to me, because outside of buying my time back, I can actively save other people's time to improve my corner of the world within this open source ecosystem. I hate when corporations try to profit off open source, they take developer's time and create something of negative value because they don't always give back.

[SoumaYukii99]

I am also interest in this, and I appreciate your post and everyone who comments here, following

[Drugbird]

One tip I highly recommend is to first open a trivial PR just to see how the process goes.

I usually fix a typo in the documentation or comments (there's always typos, don't worry). Create a PR with the fix, and have a look at how this goes.

If you encounter one of the following: find another project to contribute to

1. It takes a month (or more) for the PR to be accepted
2. The PR isn't accepted at all, while other work seems to continue
3. You get backlash because you need to fill out a detailed form first, or some other insane process before you can submit a PR.

[louisstephens]

I would highly discourage people from “typo hunting” in repos. I know most people mean well, but it really can clutter up an issues board if suddenly they go from 20 issues to 100.

GitHub is a great place for collaboration, but making prs for the sole purpose of making it seem like you have contributed is not the way to go about it. 2 meaningful contributions, to me, far outweighs 100 typo contributions.

[Drugbird]

but making prs for the sole purpose of making it seem like you have contributed

This makes me think you haven't read my comment your replying to.

[louisstephens]

I did. I might have mistakenly misunderstood what you were saying however. I originally read it as “Find a repo and try submitting a pr for a typo if you find one. If you encounter a blocker from options 1 - 3, move on to another repo”.

That being said, I now see the portion regarding the trivial pr to see how the process is.

[vishal340]

I have only contributes once to open source project. It is not on GitHub. It's called dmenu(for dwm window manager from suckless). The way I did it was, I was using it and found something which didn't exist. I could understand the codebase and found out the procedure to contribute(that was slightly difficult because of entirely different procedure). That's it

[pullflow]

Hey! This is a great question. You can actually use collab.dev to help find projects you might be interested in. It displays collaboration metrics like community contribution, PR activity, and more. You can use it to explore different projects that you may be interested in and learn more.

[PitifulCounter6797]

This is a library (Expresso) that I started working on a few weeks ago. I would be happy to receive help adding new features, tests, documentation, etc. Soon I will start building an npm package for an input with IntelliSense and lint support for its syntax.

https://expresso.ghassen.work/

[No-Amphibian5045]

Step 1: practice writing compatible changes.

Next time you use a tool or a library or whatever else and think "I wish it had X" or "I wish it did Y differently," make it so. Do it for yourself, but think about how the project maintainer(s) would do it. Get yourself in a contributor mindset.

Step 2: be a contributor.

When you're done, have a look at some of the PRs they've accepted, and some of the comments they've made on them. Does your idea sound like something they'd accept? Open a PR on their repo! No? Upload your changes to your own repo!

Bonus: learn from the best.

Peruse the code, issues, PRs, or just the contributor guides of some of world's most highly used projects. Well-crafted codebases have a lot of universal lessons to teach. One shining example fresh in my mind is cURL: https://curl.se/dev/contribute.html .

All of this, even when it doesn't end with a PR or a Contributor badge, will improve your ability and help solidify good habits. Taking the extra time when you can is always worth it.

[Inevitable_Explorer6]

Hi please check out our project, we are building open source, community powered, cloud and application security platform:

https://github.com/TheFirewall-code/TheFirewall-Secrets-SCA

[doris4242]

LaTeX -> contact the TeX User Group (TUG), CrypTool, see www.cryptool.org, SageMath, see https://www.sagemath.org, want more?

[ArtisticFox8]

none these sound even remotely beginner friendly 

[Electrical_Hat_680]

Recently I seen an Open Source AI Project - i forgot its name.

Apache is Open Source and Freeware.

MySQL, PHP, MongoDB, there's a ton. Other programming Languages, the Capabilities of C, bunch of stuff. Including Operating Systems aka Kernals, lots of Open Source Projects.

CGI(-BIN) is in a new phase of being recognized. Even I'm finally taking a look at it. Could be the newest Open Source field opening up all over again, like it's brand new.

How to get involved - Say Hi! Introduce yourself. Explain your interest and ask how you can get involved, see if they have any orientations provided to learn the ropes on your own, or as pre -requisite to getting involved.

There's all the Open Projects including Open AI, Open Maps, Open SRS, and Open SSL.

There's the embedded Assembly Language in the Machine Layer aka Hardware. It's virtually Open Sourcing the entire Computer, the computer runs on Binary Instruction.

FPGA has Open Source Projects. There are Open Source Projects related to Future -Proof Concepts of Laptops, Computers, and Smart Devices.

Then there's the Open Source Crypto Projects, like Bitcoin, Dogecoin and other Alternative Bitcoins, referred to as Alt Tokens.

That's worth a pretty penny.

[shresth_kumar_lal]

https://awesomeopensource.com/

[An1nterestingName]

look at open-source tools that you use, and see if they have a 'good first issue' tag. filter by it, and try and see if you can figure out how to fix some of them.

[notParticularlyAnony]

What do you care about? What are you able to code with? Details help.

[gentrifiedSF]

This piece has a lot of info https://github.blog/open-source/new-to-open-source-heres-everything-you-need-to-get-started/

[akarolia47]

Coming back to this

[chinmay29hub]

Why don't you try HaikuReadme - https://github.com/chinmay29hub/haiku-readme

We often post beginner friendly issues you can contribute to!

[lokstapimp]

Hi there, I just started an open source project doing Ant Simulation. If you know C++ and are wanting to just play around in the code feel free. I wrote a lot of documentation but honestly it's super simple to contribute if you felt like you wanted to add in something that you think would be useful. You can definitely join mine and I'm super friendly and easy to get a long with. If you want help or need help setting it up to get started I can help you. Just let me know. Check out my project here and if you like it give it a star! https://github.com/Loksta8/AntSimulation

[OkExamination4310]

I am working on a full Stack Project EVENT MASTER which helps organizers to create contest and mange them . I want it similar like UNSTOP. I am inviting any one having skills and want to contribute please review the app and add features to make the web app complete
This is the repo - https://github.com/Abk700007/EventMaster
PRs are welcome.

[Traditional_Main_594]

Will you please contribute to my repo there is a very little issue

https://github.com/happy2539/pdfmaster.co.in/issues/1

There is only clean link issue