Contribution to Open Source?

Hi Pranjal,

Open source is open to everyone, so if you feel comfortable with doing that I'm sure the tech community is always open and friendly to new people contributing to their work.

You can find projects all over Github that offer changes by doing what are called pull requests. You might clone the project on to your system, make the changes you think might help the project in a separate branch and then offer it as a pull request. If you use a git branch, you shouldn't be able to, or be allowed to propose anything that breaks a pre written project.

Good luck! :-)

Hiya there! Open Source is not just about contributing to code base. Some people contribute with documentations or emailing lists or marketing or even Meetups. But you can contribute to their code base as well. And yes its true you might need to have more deeper knowledge about the language. But that shouldnt stop you from contributing to open source projects. All it needs a first step.

Now the most important question is how to find projects as a beginner? If you're a beginner , you must have used third party plugins and libraries that you really liked and solved most of your headaches, why not go with projects that interests you the most? But dont jump right in coz time is money. There are other factors that you need to keep in mind:

• the last commit
• pull requests
• issues
• look at the conversations and find out how friendly maintainers are?
• stars
• documentation

Dont be rushed! Put the project on watch mode and watch every conversation and pull requests. Choose like 5 or 6 different projects that you really interests you and you feel like you can really improve this project, and choose one of 'em 5 projects that seems really trendy and has really thorough documentation to help you out. I hope it helped!

~ Ari

This post was featured on the Treehouse Show! Thanks for another thoughtful question Pranjal Agnihotri , and thanks for the wonderful answers Jonathan Grieve and Ari Misha