This is how you can contribute to open source projects. Hey guys, I often recommend to contribute to open-source to improve your coding skills on a big project and in a big team. But, many don’t know how to actually do that. I hope this post wll clear some of your doubts and encourage you to try it out. Did you contribute to open source before? Let us know below.
7 Steps to Contribute In Open Source Projects
1.GET FAMILIAR WITH GIT AND GITHUB
Without it you won’t get anywhere if you want
to contribute to open-source apps.
You don’t need to become an expert, but you should
know the basics of It (push, pull, add, commits, branches, merging, stashing, repositories)
2. FIND THE PROJECT YOU WANT TO CONTRIBUTE TO
Take your time with this. Research in the internet or take a look at my recent post to find some of the coolest Android open-source projects.
If you’re a beginner, I recommend not to start With the biggest project as thiS can easily demotivate you.
You should listen to your gut feeling. GitHub also has a trending page where you can find the coolest projects.
3. EVALUATE HOW ACTIVE A PROJECT IS
In GitHub you can fork repositories. A fork is
nothing else than a copy of a repository.
Therefore, you can freely experiment with changes on your fork without affecting the real project.
Usually, the higher the number of forks for a GitHub repository is the more developers are actively working on it. Another importarnt indicator is how often people Commit and when the latest Commit was.
4. DECIDE HOW YOU WANT TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE PROJECT
A big misconception is that people think they need to code well to contribute to open-source. You don’t! There are so many areas in which you can offer your help.
You could improve the design, document the code, organize the project, review other’s code and of course code on new features. Decide what you want.
5. SEARCH FOR ISSUES
Every open-source project on GitHub has kind of a forum where issues are listed. There you can find bugs and issues related to the project. Go and find an issue you would like to work on!
6. COMMUNICATION IS EVERYTHING!
Whenever you are unsure about something or
want to ask something, you are free to do that.
But, please read the Readme and documentation before doing it and only ask if you didn’t find what you were searching for. Also, keep the communication public, don’t write privately with
other contributors if not for a particular
reason.
7. SUBMIT YOUR WORK
After you submit what you have been working on, your submission needs to be reviewed by other people. If you don’t even get a response within a week, it’s totally fine to politely ask for a review.
Another thing that could happen is that someone wants you to change something in your code. Then just do that and re-submit it.
If it gets declined, it’s fine to ask why. If it gets
accepted, congrats, you successfully contributed to
open-source.
