One of the difficulties faced by people who are interested in contributing to open source is finding a project or issue to work on.
Once we have decided on the repo to contribute, we need to understand the tech stack and the guidelines followed by the project. Most of the projects will have contributing guidelines with steps to set up the project for local development.
Go through the code base, understand the architecture, patterns and tech stack. Then go to the Issues tab and filter by good first issue. Issues which have this label will be beginner friendly and easy to understand.
Issues Specific to kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap
After finalizing the issue/issues you like to work upon, tag a maintainer stating that you are interested in working on this issue so that they can assign it to you This step helps you and other contributors know that someone is working on this particular issue else someone will raise a PR against your interested issue. So it is always better to start working on issues once it is assigned to you
Keep the issue updated by posting your progress or roadblocks you face or even drop a note when you can’t continue working on for any reason and un-assign yourself from the issue so others can pick it up. Updating issues will help maintainers, issue owners and issue subscribers to know what’s happening around the issue.
Sometimes we need to get more information or help to close the issue. Most of the time projects will have community(Slack, Discord, Gitter) links added in their website or in Readme file. You can join those forums and ask your queries over there. You can also ask others in the forums to try out your features and get feedback.
Contributions are not only limited to writing code, low-code contributions are also welcome
- Create issues
- Do a code review
- Organizing issues
- Maintain a community / forum
- Experience Design (XD)
- Graphic Design (UI/UX)
- Video Production
- Technical Documentation
- Testing
- Translations
Every year in October, Hacktoberfest event is conducted to pull people to contribute to open source, during that time a lot of PR’s will be created (be mindful and don’t spam maintainers with duplicate or unwanted PR’s). Hacktoberfest is organized by DigitalOcean along with GitHub and GitLab
Open source contribution is not limited to October month alone, consider it as a starting point and keep on doing this good thing (contributing back to the community)
Even you can continue this by making it a new hobby or spending some time on fridays.(https://opensourcefriday.com/).
