How to Make Your 1st OpenSource Contribution

You have been hearing good things about OSS.

A solid OSS contribution will take somewhere from 3-6 months. It involves getting accustomed to the project, reading and understanding their code base, finding interesting issues, fixing the code, making a PR and fixing the reviews until the maintainers are ready to merge.

Here are the steps I would recommend

  1. Pick an open-source project that you already use every day. For example, in Python, the easiest way is to look at your requirements file

  2. If you already know anything you can improve, raise an issue.

  3. Go through the Github issues. Filter by label Good first issue

  4. If there aren't any good first issues, Go through other issues and find the ones you are interested in

  5. Read their contributor guidelines Contributing.md file

  6. Fork and clone the repo follow the setup instructions

  7. Make the fix, add test cases, and run linters, most codebases have a dev setup

  8. Push the PR. follow the PR and commit guidelines

  9. Incorporate the changes that reviewers give you. Maintainers are busy, so it's a good idea to find active reviewers and mention them in PR comments for review

  10. Merged

How I made my 1st OSS Contribution?


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