Contributing to an Open Source GitHub Project
I recently did my first contribution to an open source project, and I wanted to share some of the resources and sites I used. I had looked into doing this before, but all the resources and things I wanted to know all seemed too spread out, it was hard to make sense of what I needed to do, or I didn’t feel confident I wasn’t going to end up making a totally bogus pull request in the end. This time around, I seemed to have lucked out and found everything I wanted to know.
First off, finding https://www.firsttimersonly.com/ helped a lot. I wish I had found this the first time I was looking in open source projects. They have a ton of helpful links to places where you can find open source projects, they encourage people to leave small bug fixes in open source projects for beginners to fix, and best of all, they’ve got a link to a project you can practice on.
The First Contributions GitHub project, found here https://github.com/firstcontributions/first-contributions, is a project solely set-up to let people test out the process of contributing to an open source project. I’ll keep my description of the process to a summary: you’re going to fork the repository, clone it, make a new branch for yourself, make your changes (for their project, they suggest you add your name to their Contributors.md file), push the changes to GitHub, and then submit a pull request. Their README goes into a lot more detail and has pictures for every step, so it’s hard to get too far off track. Plus, they have a nice bit of automation that will accept your pull request after it gets submitted. Normally, someone would be manually reviewing your changes, so this part is a bit sped up, but otherwise, this is a nice little sandbox to test out a simple contribution.
Finally, you need to find a project you can work on. Unless you already have something in mind, this step might be pretty tricky. Luckily, First Timers Only showed me two great aggregator sites, https://up-for-grabs.net/ and https://goodfirstissues.com/. Both sites keep track of GitHub projects that are leaving in simple bugs and issues for beginners to fix and contribute to the project. Each one has gives you a few options to search and filter through their collection, so you should be able to find something you want to work on and appropriate to your skill level. That being said, “beginner” or “first-timer” can be pretty subjective, so you may be doing a bit of searching before you find something the right project for you.
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