My experience with Open Source Contributions

I always wanted to contribute to open source. It was one of my goals when I started my career as a Software Developer, but I was hesitant to start working on my first contribution because I believed I needed years of experience, and a rich skillset to make successful contributions to open source. Here I am, today, with more than 50 contributions to open source as I look forward to many more in the future.

If you have doubts about making contributions to open source as I did, don’t dwell on them, and start working on your first contribution. You will not regret it.

My Git Graph

My learning experiences:

I gained so many valuable skills since I started contributing to open-source projects. After making a few contributions, I gained a deeper understanding of how the git commands work including but not limited to rebase and squash commit commands. I also learned how workflows on GitHub actions work.

Whenever I was in situations where I needed help, there was support available from reviewers and committers which made the whole process easier. Additionally, I found that getting your code reviewed by experts in specific skills is a great way to improve those skills since you can learn from the years of experience they have. Learning from their experience makes you a better programmer as a whole.

Why should you contribute to open source?

There are a lot of reasons why you should contribute to open source. Some of them are listed below:

1. It is a great way to improve your programming skills. From my personal experience, I improved as a programmer by making open-source contributions.
2. You gain experience working in a collaborative environment.
3. It gives you an opportunity to understand the projects you used, as a programmer, at a much deeper level.
4. Your code might get used by millions of users who will benefit from your contributions.

How to start contributing to Open Source?

Many people think that contributing to open-source projects is only about writing code. You can contribute in many other ways as well. These include contributing by updating documentation, creating an issue, or reviewing other developers’ code. You can make a significant contribution in one of these ways.

Each open-source software is different so you should start by reading the documentation. Contribution guidelines are always provided in the documentation which describes the ways to make a contribution and how to create a PR. I highly recommend reading the documentation thoroughly before you start working on a contribution. Once you find a project, go to the issues of the repository. You can find issues for beginners under the tag “good first issue” or “beginner friendly”. Just pick any one of those issues and start contributing.

Where can I start?

GitHub is a good place to start. There are a great number of projects on GitHub that encourage first-time contributors. If you have a project that you support, you should look for it on GitHub. On the other hand, you should check Eclipse collections for open source contributions.

Finally, I would like to give a special thanks to Donald Raab for helping me in my journey!

To the people who are reading this, I hope I was able to motivate you to contribute to open source. Go for it, and spread the love for open source!