How to Make Your First Open Source Contribution

Introduction

Getting into to web development looked easy to me, until when I got to the stage of contributing to open source, it became more complex and tiring honestly.

But I actually discovered, that there’s actually nothing that’s really complex about web development and open source contribution.

In this article I’ll share some details to make your first open source contribution easily and quickly.

Let’s go!

Firstly start with projects you’re already using

As a web developer, it’s mostly impossible not to use frameworks, libraries and programming languages that are open source, and that should be your first point of action. Example NPM ( Node package manager) is a highly useful package in web development, and it has numerous packages available that are open source.

For me as a flutter developer, flutter SDK toolkits are my go-to anytime I’m busy contributing to open source.

Just begin contributing to the frameworks/toolkits you’re using at the moment in your web development career.

GitHub Explore

GitHub explore section is a very easy and fast way to see new projects to contribute to, there’s much to the GitHub explore section than you think…

You can find projects grouped in collections or topics, or that are trending.

Some Collections that I noticed are government apps, made in Brazil, getting started with machine learning, made in Africa,

You can check out hello-git repo which I discovered on the explore section in GitHub…

Open source programs

As a developer there are initiatives and programs that’ll help you solve, learn and improve your level in contributing to open source projects.

These programs help you identify problems with some open source project, solving the stress of searching for solutions to improve a project.

They include;

1. CodeTraige

2. Gauger

3. Ovio.org

As a developer there’re lots of projects waiting for your contributions in the list above…it’s up to you!

Warning ⚠️

Be aware that once you locate a project to which you would like to contribute, it may no longer be actively maintained.

Therefore, even if you want to directly contribute, there might not be maintainers who will accept your contribution.

Check to see if there have been any recent discussions in issues, pull requests, or commits to the main default branch to determine whether a project is active.

Additionally, you can search for any notice that the project is no longer being maintained. If they are no longer maintaining the project, maintainers frequently archive the repository or leave a statement in the README or an issue.

Another piece of advice I can give you is that if you are just getting started with open source contributions, it might be easier for you to contribute to less popular projects.

These projects may have fewer issues and pull requests, so the maintainer might be able to give you more attention. In any case, popular projects that might have issues with the beginner-friendly labels I mentioned earlier can still be looked at. Despite the fact that its popularity can make it difficult to contribute

Conclusion

Open source contribution can be your net step to your dream opportunities in tech.

Don’t sleep on it!

Thanks for reading to this point!

Hope you didn’t waste your time reading, if you enjoy it pls like and share it to others.

Let’s keep grinding!