DEV Community

Ashraf Alam
Ashraf Alam

Posted on

Learn Fast by Contributing to an Open Source Project

Did you know how great developers are enhancing them to learn and contribute to new technologies?

They follow only 5 steps:

  1. explore an open source project at github,
  2. create fork (your own branch),
  3. make changes on the project on whatever you think requires improvement
  4. submit a pull request
  5. If your changes are good, project leaders will incorporate your changes in the original project (for this step you don't have to do anything but ☺).

Even if your pull request is not accepted right away, through the pull request message board, you'll continue learning about how you can enhance your idea and coding skills to fit with a certain standard.

Starting to contribute to a large open source project can be very challenging, as usually these projects involve long effort to understand the code and complex contribution process.

Start contributing to a small open source instead.

For example, you can start experimenting open source contribution with relatively small project like EISK, which is available in github now!

Check cool features available in asp.net core implemented at EISK and feel free to create fork and submit pull request with your suggested updates.

We look forward for your pull requests.

Visit: eisk web api

Happy coding!

Top comments (4)

Collapse
 
geocine profile image
Aivan Monceller

To make this really natural, I suggest don't just start looking randomly for repositories to contribute to. Here is how I choose 'naturally'

  1. Start your own project on Github. Something that truly interest you.
  2. I'm sure you will be using some third-party dependencies for your project. You will encounter issues along the way as well. Take a list of all this third-party dependencies. Out of the list, choose which one you are using the most.
  3. If you encountered a bug for the dependency that you have chosen or want to improve something then start contributing to that project.

This is how I choose which projects I contribute to.

Collapse
 
thefern profile image
Fernando B πŸš€

This is exactly the same steps I follow. I created this project and along the way, contributed to one of the dependencies. github.com/kodaman2/Data_Preserve

A repo you use, is a good way to stay focused about the project and even cultivate new ideas/features for the repo you contribute to.

Another way to start your own repo is to think about things you do in your everyday life or work that are repetitive and might be easily replaced with a program.

Collapse
 
thefern profile image
Fernando B πŸš€

Step 0. Make sure the repo is active. If there are open issues from three years ago, multiple PRs without activity. I would suggest to stay away, unless it is something you use and think you can make better on your own fork.

Collapse
 
ltdat287 profile image
dat le tien

Thanks for suggestion !