Hacker News Reader

Comment by spacesuit | Hacker News Reader

This post raises some interesting points about the difficulty of contributing to open source for the first time. Over the last year, I've taught myself to code. I want to contribute to open source, and I think I can provide value to smaller projects. But the public nature and unique culture of open source have left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. So I observe instead.

What's the best way for a rookie to find small, welcoming open-source projects to contribute to?

View on HN

Try to get into a bugmash of some kind. I started this way with Rails and I wrote about it http://www.rohitarondekar.com/articles/my-first-rails-bugmas...

Many companies and tech groups have these around the world during meetups and conferences.

But most importantly dont let this pull request fool you. Rails is nice to contribute to even if you are starting out and the rails core team especially jose valim and santiago pastorino are super helpful.

Start your own project.

Open source is not strictly about contributing to existing projects. You can start as many new projects as you'd like.

My experience is that many big projects started out as personal (read small) projects that grew out of adoption.

What kind of projects should you start?

Pick something that you reason you can solve with your current knowledge, and get working.

Find a "small" project is probably best. I've contributed to probably over a dozen opensource projects on Github in the past year or so. I highly encourage you to find a few that you use and like. They don't even have to be really small, but I'd probably avoid projects like Ruby, Rails or the Linux kernel for now.

I very recently wrote http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2012/03/16/your-iden... and I think it's very relevant in encouraging people just beginning to contribute to open source.

Find a small project you use for something you're building. Do you run into any issues with using it, that could be improved? Improve those and send a pull request. Make your first commit small and obvious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com