Contributing to Open Source Can Change Your Life - Here’s How to Do It

There are over 128000000 open source projects on GitHub and every single one of them has the potential to change your life forever.

Whether you are building your GitHub street cred, fixing a bug, adding a feature to a project you personally use, or just fixing typos, every pull request you submit moves you one step further in your development career.

GitHub is the new resume and every contribution you make builds your collaboration skills and associates your name with the massive community of driven individuals out there making software for fun and profit.

So… There’s no time like the present. let’s learn how to find an open-source project and make your first contribution right now!

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1. Find a project and an issue
2. Read the rules
3. Fork the project, make a branch
4. The next and very important step is like and subscribe if you enjoy this video, thanks!
5. Make your changes
6. Push your changes
7. Open a pr that resolves the issue
8. Monitor and receive feedback gracefully

[tiamabderezai]

Love how short yet detailed this is, not a 10-20 minute to an hour video, not a whole lecture/series, just straight to the point

[Monk-E]

Contributing is fun, it's nice to be part of a project used by thousands of people

[zb]

I agree, if I could start my journey over I would jump straight into Open source and treat that as my ‘projects’ vs building things on your own. Because not only are you contributing but you’re also working with others as a team. Most definitely will look good on your resume and you will for sure meet mentors and high name tech contributors and even get paid through open source. Would encourage anyone starting out to prioritize open source over building things or a portfolio for a job

[firefoxmetzger]

I think you forgot step 0 when contributing code: Leave a comment on any issue you want to fix, state clearly that you would like to contribute a solution, and ASK(!) if a maintainer is there and willing to review/accept your work. It usually doesn't take long to get a response, gives you a general sense of the pace at which the repo operates, and saves you from contributing to dormant projects.

For the first PR it will take a couple of days to set up a dev environment, get familiar with the tooling, understand the test-suite, etc. Nothing takes the wind out of your sails faster than putting in those days of work just to see the PR sitting there for months with no feedback and no merge. So before you start, make sure you have talked to maintainers (like me) before you airdrop a PR. We don't want your work to sit around and collect dust, but unfortunately, most of us have to split our time between the project and a regular job. Having clear communication on this from the start goes a long way in having fun with open source :)

[PpMan]

It’s a wonderful feeling to find a bug in a piece of software you use and to submit a pr resolving that bug!

[carlitos]

Honestly, I think the more feedback you get on your PRs, the better. That means people doing code reviews care enough about you as a contributor that they’re willing to spend time going over your authored PR. It gives that much more meaning to your PR when it’s eventually approved and merged. And you can say, “I’ve contributed something meaningful to this project!”

[MrAokage]

this video changed my mind about open source projects, i never knew that it was so easy to contribute, thanks dude!

[NicolaiWeitkemper]

Oh yeah, getting into Linux and fixing small bugs and annoyances in the programs I used, or even just reporting them, that's how I got started.

[clout]

love this video because
1. On point
2. Time saver
3. Insightful

[Half_Blaked]

Probably the best, most straightforward video out here on contributing to open source projects. Thank you so much sir.

[michelledigdecarvalhoperei]

that was a straight to the point, very informative and cool to watch video. Great stuff man. I just started on the computer science carreer and this was 3min of solid help in my path

[thomasmunguya]

Love how you went straight to the point. Short and informative.

[LiamDennehy]

I can't agree with this enough. The sense of achievement for adding anything of value to something YOU value is amazing. I've even had my own fork become more popular than the original project, and made it the reference implementation for an IETF RFC. Aim high, and have fun.

Oh, and read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" for a primer on how open source rewards contributors, and how contributors reward open source.

[tirdnow]

An amazing video. So much information condensed into such a small sized video. Absolutely love it! <3

[rushiljain]

Thanks for the quick and short video. Really helps out and doesn’t overwhelm newcomers!

[nathancarver]

*Thank you* so much for this.
GitHub has always been really confusing for me to use and navigate, so having clear, to-the-point instructions or standards here have been really helpful.

[ToadalSimplicity]

Great advice! Can’t believe I never thought to look at the dependencies of a project to find other projects to contribute to. Love that suggestion!

[abstractbrandon]

Great video! Perfectly short and digestible. As somebody who's been wanting to get into contributing to open source, this video was extremely helpful!

[lycorice]

Thank you so much for this post! I’ve always wondered how to contribute, I love how concise and straight to the point it is!

[pranaypallavtripathi]

Thank you so much for this. I have never seen the complete process being explained so clearly like this.