Good first issues don’t exist
From my time at GitHub, I learned that the label“good first issue” was created in response to the popularity of the first-timers-only project. Thanks to folks like Scott Hanselman and Kent C. Dodds there is a pathway into open-source contributions that is approachable. The good first issue adds a label to identify bugs and minor fixes for anyone looking for a safe space to try their hand at an approachable contribution.
This blog post came out of a series of tweets I created last year.https://twitter.com/bdougieYO/status/1561746501738459137 https://twitter.com/bdougieYO/status/1561746501738459137
Fast forward to today, and you can’t ask someone how to find good first issues and have them rattle off goodfirstissue.dev or firstpr.me or even opensource.guide. As someone who lead developer advocacy at GitHub, I can say the majority of those folks have not used those tools, and I can say that with confidence because the majority have not been updated since before 2018.
Today there are 280 million repositories on GitHub. Of that number, only 230 thousand have more than five contributors. There is a lot of answer to why that is, but to state it simply, only 0.1% of the projects on GitHub provide an approachable space for new contributors.
