Contributing to open source will change your life | How to start

Right now open source contributions are being used as the new resume and it can potentially change your life all together.

In this article we will be discussing what is open source contributions and how do you actually do that?

Even if you don’t have any kind of coding knowledge or just want to get started with open source contributions, then this article is the perfect one for you. Because by the end of this article you will have made your first contribution.

Knowingly or unknowingly you would have used a lot of open source projects for example VLC media player, Mozilla Firefox and a lot more.

What are open source contributions?

Open source applications basically mean that their entire source code is available to the public for contributions.

Once you do these contributions, it will get recorded in your profile. It basically acts as your resume. You can even land good jobs using this.

Right now companies are focusing more and more on portfolio and the projects that you contributed to rather than having those traditional resumes.

So, what are the things that you need to keep in mind when you start with open source contributions.

Things to keep in Mind:

The first thing is when you actually find these projects to contribute to, you can just open up any of your projects there would be a list of dependencies, that that project depends on.

So most, if not all of these dependencies will have open source code. Because you have already used these dependencies and already know a lot about them.  You can go and contribute to these projects as well.

The next place where you can find these projects is GitHub, over there you can find these projects according to topics. For example, if you are really good at python programming language and want to contribute to a project which uses that. So you can just search python and you would get a list of repositories which basically run on python.

Ok, now you found your perfect open source project to contribute to.

How do you actually, because you do not need to go through the entire code and understand it in depth.

To be honest, most of the contributors have not even seen 90% of the code of that repository. The first file that you need to check out is the README.md file and the second one is contributing.md.

Both of these files would contain guidelines and rules in order to contribute to that particular project.

Every project has their own rules and you need to understand them before you start contribute. But I know it’s quite complicated if someone is doing this for the first time.

Just head over to the issues section, sort these issues according to GOOD FIRST CONTRIBUTION and you would find a list of contributions that you can do if you are doing it for the first time.

Now, these can range anywhere from writing a few lines of code to even doing some documentation. Many of these projects need proper documentation and you can just type out these documentation in order to contribute to that project.

You can even fix typos and formatting errors in order to contribute to them.

Now once you found a good issue that you want to contribute to, you can just type it down in the comment section and just ask them if there are any contributors who are already working on it or any maintainers who are maintaining the repository.

Once you do get a go ahead to work on that issue you can start working on it and make up PR request.

PR is basically PULL REQUEST but before that you need to folk the repository.

Once done you can make changes in that repository. Off course make another branch for it and then push that branch down onto the main one.

But this could be considered as a Pull Request, and once the maintainers have gone through it they will give you some feedback on top of it as well.

Once you gone through all the feedback, then they will merge your PR onto the main branch and you could see your changes in the main repository as well.

Conclusion:

Now you know what open source contributions are and also how we can do these contributions. As a beginner you should start with small contributions and with time when you learn more and more things you can start contributing to large projects.

If you want to learn more about coding then in the coming months we are going to start the coding related articles as well where you will get to know about basics very well.

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Also if you have any suggestions for us then let us know in the comment box or you can directly contact us via email.

Thank you so much for reading this article, go and do your first open source contribution now.