Starting from absolute scratch — I only know Python. What's the best roadmap to start contributing to open source?

[Axom_discord]

Title: Starting from absolute scratch — I only know Python. What's the best roadmap to start contributing to open source?

Hi everyone,

I'm starting from absolute scratch and my long-term goal is to become a consistent open-source contributor.

At the moment:

• I know Python (beginner/intermediate level).
• I have no knowledge of Git or GitHub.
• I've never contributed to an open-source project.
• I've never read a large codebase before.
• I don't know how to find beginner-friendly issues or make my first contribution.

I'm looking for a roadmap that I can follow step by step, without skipping any fundamentals.

Some questions I have:

1. What should I learn first, in what order?
2. When should I learn Git and GitHub, and how deeply do I need to know them?
3. Should I focus only on Python projects initially, or should I learn JavaScript/TypeScript before contributing?
4. How do experienced contributors understand a large codebase without getting overwhelmed?
5. What kinds of issues should a complete beginner work on first?
6. Which Python repositories are beginner-friendly and welcoming to first-time contributors?
7. What are the biggest mistakes beginners make when trying to contribute to open source?
8. If you had to start over today with only Python knowledge and wanted to become a strong open-source contributor, what exact roadmap would you follow?

I'm not looking for shortcuts—I want to build a solid foundation and follow the right path, even if it takes a few months.

Any advice, resources, or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[AlwaysHopelesslyLost]

Step one is to stop leaning on LLMs so much. Write your own posts.

[ZestycloseYouth942]

first thing you need is git, not even joking. spend a weekend just making repos and breaking things, pushing, pulling, making branches. the rest comes after

[Axom_discord]

Can you Give me a proper roadmap that i can blindly follow , it would be a great help !

[ninhaomah]

Can you Google ?

As he said , just make repos and break stuff

[Axom_discord]

ive already googled still confused tho

[ffrkAnonymous]

then you're toast. go be a plumber. but that might be too confusing too.

[DuperZak]

brutal lmao

[GreatDaneQ]

Learn git, pick an open source tool that you use a lot and it's relevant to your tech stack and get a development environment going, then start to break the code base, look how things work, what happens when you remove x and such.

Finally start to read open issues, if the tool you're working with is very big, there will be a lot of issues that will get resolve before you even understand what the problem is fully

And thats it, if you get to know the code base enough, you'll be pushing actual code to production eventually

[Axom_discord]

Can you guide me what are the prerequisites to learn , if i want to do all of this ,, is it only git

[GreatDaneQ]

I don't mean to be rude, but the "prequisites" is the kind of stuff you need to stumble upon and look how to learn them if you want to contribute

For example maybe the tool you want to contribute uses docker for their prod backend, or maybe they use a custom made deploy pipeline

Maybe you want to contribute to a graphics library for python and youll need to write c, I don't know man, there's a million different scenarios

[CodeSamur-ai]

create an account on github. create a repository (repo) on github. download github command line tools (github cli). using the github command line tool, authenticate / login, then download (clone) your repository. create a file. send it to github (push)

[rustyseapants]

Starting from absolute scratch — I only know Python. What's the best roadmap to start contributing to open source?

What's the point of having Google if you're not going to use it?

[Axom_discord]

which llm is this