I have little experience with open source, but currently I’m neither associated with nor active in any open source project. I want to be, and I have a good plan for it. From my experience, I believe it’s a good plan, so other people who want to get involved but struggle might find it helpful. Keep in mind this is my plan and may not suit everyone.
Precaution
While many guides paint a rosy picture, keep in mind two key points:
- Your initial issues, pull requests, and comments may be ignored—patience and persistence build credibility.
- Ramping up is challenging; gaining deep understanding of the codebase, culture, and workflows takes time, especially without direct mentorship.
- Pick a beginner-friendly OSS, something that excites you. For example, if the project has newbie friendly things in their README.md, or Contribution guide. You also see newbies are welcomed in their communication channel (e.g., Github issues, Discord).
- Find issues with good first issue tags on GitHub, or look for some TODO comments in the code, and resolve them. Then, write a comment on the issue or submit a PR solving that issue. Do this until one of the contributors to the project notices your existence.
- Don’t limit your contributions. Adding new tests, feature requests are also really great. Try to make your actions meaningful. To get hints to be more meaningful, ask help from other contributors.
- Send a message on their communication channel (e.g., Discord, Slack, email) to express your interest and seek advice on how to get more involved. I believe that if you have made a handful of contributions, then someone—most likely the reviewer of your PR—will answer your question.
- Continue contributing until you get recognized by them. It’s important to build credibility. You may not have enough skill to do something, or you may disappear after showing your interest; both cases are very common among newcomers to a project.
- Once you have proven your ability to do meaningful work and have been acknowledged, you’re in.
I’ve been following this plan for a few weeks. I have not achieved anything monumental yet.
I’ll revisit this post later, after I have actually accomplished something.