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Comment by Linell | Hacker News Reader

How can someone who has time and could be that "fit gazelle" get into contributing to open source?

I have tried several times. At least, I've looked at a few of the suggestions on how to get started. All of the ideas don't quite work, though. Namely because most of the suggestions are things that I've either never even heard of or that I do not use. The gardening approach mentioned not long ago on this site seems very good for beginners - but I feel that just jumping in and starting with this could be a bad thing if the organization already has some sort of system set up.

For example, I have used Express. I don't really understand it well enough, and I've never had reason to, jump into the source code. There are only ten open issues. For just about every open source thing I've used, this is the case. Am I just doing something wrong?

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Don't force it. If the itch isn't there, don't scratch it.

Instead, look for things that are interesting to you, follow your passion; if that eventually leads to an OSS project (either your own or helping on an existing one), great! Just avoid toxic startup cultures that require forced OSS track records and then provide "unlimited" vacations.

There are several ways to get started and it depends a lot on your motivations and are of interest. However the main piece of advice is to jump in, dont be worried about upsetting someone system, some OS projects arent setup well for contribution and they will become easy to spot, but for the ones that are, doing something 'wrong' is a great way for a maintainer to come along and help introduce you to how to do it 'right'.

http://openhatch.org works a lot on making initial contributions easier, if you are interested in express then you dont need to work on the core framework, write a plugin and open source it, contributing is by far easier when you have a real need to do so, maybe someone will use your plugin and find a problem they want to fix, maybe you will use someones project and want to fix something.

Contributing to open source doesnt mean only contributing to someone else's project. You can always start yours, it can be as simple as you want and about whatever you want.

I would suggest reading through the Express (or any popular project) source code to improve yourself as a JavaScript developer. As you do, there will inevitably be things you notice that should be fixed. E.g. typos, edge cases, refactoring[0]. Fixing those will help you familiarize yourself with the project, the process, and will eventually lead to bigger contributions.

[0] Though be careful with that. Only refactor stuff if you're pretty confident about how it works, and that your changes don't decrease performance or readability.

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