How can one initiate involvement in open source contribution?

[sg2435]

I have been in the software engineering field for over four years, yet I haven't contributed to any open-source platforms. With the AI field expanding and numerous open-source opportunities emerging, how can I begin contributing?

Where should I look or what criteria should I consider when seeking places to contribute code?

[__d]

I would suggest that you identify a bug or missing feature in an Open Source project that you personally use, and fix/implement it.

This helps ensure you understand the issue, provides motivation to work on it, and ideally to continue to support your work into the future.

I find there's no shortage of such opportunities, and that the interaction with the project owners/maintainers has helped me to learn productive communication strategies, good approaches to proposing new ideas, etc.

[gus_massa]

Do you know how to use git and github?

As the sibling comment says, find a project you use and like. Start with something tiny, like fixing a typo or implementing a small feature. Try to implement it in only 2 or 3 days, so if the maitainer doesn't like it or is a moron you have not wasted too much time.

Each project has it's own weird rules, like space vs tabs, or how much tests to add, or style in the name of the comits, or rebase vs merge or ... So expect to make a few corrections in your first PR until you learn the weird rules.

Sending good bugs reports is also a vvery important contribution. It's good to see haw they solved them to understand the structure of the codebase and weird rules, becuse next time you can try to fix it yourself and send a PR. But remember that a good bug report is useful too.

[burhanrashid52]

The easiest and most approved contributions are documentation. Start with that and move on to bugs and then features.

[joshxyz]

imo keep using the ones that genuinely interest you until you find edge cases that you want ot be solved, or edge cases other found that you also want to be solved.

fork, create a pr, done.

[jawmes8 → joshxyz]

That’s what made it easier for me. I would be that drive-by user in discord or searching for “Good First Issue” without even being remotely interested in the project. Now I try to focus on using it first. It was mostly an ego thing I had to move past