Posted on 12/12/2023

My first open source contribution 🐣

In an attempt at getting comfortable with GitHub, I made my first open source contribution; a README file for Dennis Ivy’s personal website. It was a small contribution but it’s a start!

After tweeting about my first contribution, I received a lot of questions about how to get started with open source. I’m still a beginner myself but I wanted to share some tips and resources to help you get comfortable with contributing to open source projects.

Before starting

A few things to note before you start contributing to open source projects:

• Understand how to pull, edit and push a repo (if not, see resources below)
• Make sure the original creator is open to help
• Understand that the creator doesn’t need to accept your pull request if they have a different vision for their project or just looking for something different

What to look for

Contributing to open source doesn’t have to be a big project like I thought. You can start small and work your way up. Here are some ideas of what to look for:

• spelling mistakes
• fixing bugs
• missing readme file
• solving solutions
• mobile responsiveness
• feature ideas
• And whatever else may catch your eye!

Resources

Here’s a few helpful resources:

• This Astro template is open source, you can clone it and make it your own or contribute to it.
• Open Source Roadmap by Eddie Jaoude
• List of open source projects on GitHub
• Another open source friendly project by Haimantika Mitra, a Health Browsing Extension for Chrome.
• How to pull, edit and push to GitHub