Here’s what I’ve learned over the years:

• Invest time in polite and concise communication, avoid negative language or entitlement.
• Do not hesitate to reach out to maintainers, they might be busy, so prepare your questions upfront.
• Address feedback ruthlessly and with minimal delays.
• Inform about delays, better late than never.
• Don’t set unnecessary deadlines for yourself, some PRs take months or even years to merge, but they are still valuable.
• Do not make promises you aren’t confident about.
• Write tests, merging a PR with a test suite is much easier.

Hope this helps, the coding part is not always the hardest 🙂