
Contributing to Open Source - humdrum17
I&#x27;ve seen posts in the past that describe how to get involved with contributing to open source projects. However, I feel like this advice is geared more towards more experienced developers who have a lot of exposure to different tools and frameworks and probably a lot of domain expertise.<p>How would you recommend someone who is finishing up undergrad get involved in open source? I&#x27;ve contributed to some open source web projects, but larger, more technical projects (the ones I&#x27;m interested in) seem too daunting to me right now.
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bausshf
Well you must understand the open-source tools, before you can understand the
open-source frameworks.

I would start by researching version control systems such as Git. (Note: These
aren't limited to open-source and such research will help you in actual
industrial work too!)

On top of that you'd need to understand open-source websites like Github,
Gitlab, Bitbucket etc.

Each open-source project differs in how they're maintained, how they accept
contributions etc. but understanding the basics of the above will definitely
help you understanding the criteria of the projects you want to contribute
to.¨

A good way to get started with open-source development is to create open-
source work yourself. Open-source your personal projects (Small or big) -- of
course they have to be somehow relevant to the public too eg. a framework for
getting your grandma's birthday probably isn't a good project to make open-
source.

Now the next step is to actual contribute to some ideal projects.

Here are some quick guidelines you could follow: (But don't have to.)

1\. Find a project that interest you 2\. Understand the project's vision and
goals 3\. Understand its guidelines 4\. Look up its dependencies and do some
research about them (Ex. an open-source framework for databases would most
likely require you to understand the database drivers it uses.) 5\. Inspect
issues and the project's "TODO"-list. 6\. Start by picking small issues or
feature implementations to get an understanding of how the project works and
is coupled together

A good rule of thumb is that contributing to open-source is not much different
than contributing to closed-source in eg. a private business.

A lot of businesses actually uses similar concepts, but "in-house".

