I recently read this interesting article What contributing to Open-source is, and what it isn't. They made some good points on how low-quality drive-b

Tips for getting started with OpenSource

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2024-05-05 13:00:06

I recently read this interesting article What contributing to Open-source is, and what it isn't. They made some good points on how low-quality drive-by contributions are bad for both OSS maintainers and new contributors. However, I felt like the article was missing good tips for serious contributors looking to get started with OSS.

I owe a lot of my career and learning to OSS. I think it is a great way to build up your profile and quality contributions will have a big impact on your career trajectory. But it is not very easy and like all good things, it takes time.

There are many different ways to contribute to an OSS project, but here are a few tips aimed at those looking to contribute code, and looking to become long-term maintainers.

I always suggest picking a project that you are using or willing to use regularly. This is because you’ll ideally contribute to the project for many months and it’s always easier to keep up the motivation and energy if you are an end-user of the project yourself.

If you work on a project that you don’t use, after a while, you don’t know what to work on, and which issues have more impact than others. You’ll also be building features based on user-feedback but if you can’t relate to the feature requests, then it gets harder to build the right features.