I have had a personal to-do for years to get more involved in open source projects. I literally have a doc with links to projects, tools to find good projects and bugs and even articles on do’s and dont’s when getting involved in a new project. But after years of trying, I have made zero contributions. So when GitHub announced they were going to help make it easier to find issues and projects to contribute to, I decided it’s time to complete this long-lasting to-do. And what better way to keep me accountable than to document my journey and share my experience with everyone. And to start, I want to share a few resources that I found extremely helpful:
First Timers Only
One of the top results when you search for contributing to open source. A great walk-through and some really good practical examples of how to find projects/issues to contribute to.
Good First Issue
A tool that helps you find (surprisingly) good first issues. Repo owners can tag issues with ‘good first issue’ which will be broadcast on Twitter via the @goodfirstissue handle.
And all of this assumes you’re already familiar with GitHub and git and how to create branches, PRs and merge things. On the other hand, if you don’t, there’s a really good walk-through available on GitHub called first-contributions. It’s very detailed and has lots of screenshots and has been localized in over 50 languages.
Okay, this is just the start, so tag along and hopefully you’ll learn something and be inspired to contribute as well.