How to start with Open Source?

Starting on open source contributions could be pretty hectic. You keep asking yourself whether I am ready to do this? Whether I am ready to step in to an open source community which is already so advanced on technical knowledge than myself.

I faced those very problems when I decided to start contributing to open source community for the first time. I didn’t know where to start or how to start. But with the help of my good friend Heshan and with some google research on the topic I managed to grasp the concept behind this. Although we think that we need to have a ton of technical knowledge to contribute to a open source project, it is not true, some contributions could be as simple as changing a little area of their documentation. When you get to open source, every little help counts 😊 I am writing this article to share that knowledge with you who are beginners waiting to step into open source community just like I was.

Where to start?

The websites like https://up-for-grabs.net,https://www.firsttimersonly.com/ are few good places to start. What we don’t know is that some open source projects have issues labelled just for the first time users or beginners in open source contributions. These websites search through GitHub and present such issues for you. You can filter the issues by any language you like so that you start on familiar grounds.

How to choose a project?

Once you got the list, have a good peek through the projects and their technology stacks, identify the technologies you are familiar with. When you do this, you should know what you are familiar with. You don’t have to be exceptional in the technology but being familiar helps a lot.

Select few choices which you feel like that suits you. Visit the projects on GitHub read their documentation or README.md . Go to the issues section and check whether there are any issues that you can solve. Don’t worry, not all issues are huge and beyond your level. There are some minor issues that you can resolve even if you are a beginner in open source with a bit of software background. Having very good software skills help, but again it’s not compulsory

What’s next?

Once you identify a project and an issue to contribute, read CONTRIBUTING.md .This file gives you all the information on how to start to contribute. Read the document, setup the environment and start fixing the issue.

In my next article I will write how to setup the project, write your first PR (Pull Request) and start contributing.

Till then, happy coding!