Beginner Contributions: This is how I learned to contribute to open source projects on GitHub

#opensource #beginners #tutorial #github

Intro

Feb 22, 2024. This is the absolute first time I'm actually contributing to GitHub. I've struggled and slacked, never actually learned what Git and Github are. I didn't even know what a repo was at that time. Now I've realized that forking, cloning, and all the "crazy" stuff on GitHub only takes a few hours to master. I decided to watch a bunch of YouTube videos and, most importantly, to read the "Collaborative Coding" section in GitHub Docs.

What I learned

Git-Think of this as a time machine to track everything that happened to your code. This works well with the GitHub platform. If you are using Mac(like me) git is already installed if you have Xcode. To install, refer to the "resources" section of this post, and run git commands in Mac Terminal.
Repository(Repo)-It's a place to track the version histories for all your work. You can also add a README inside a repo to explain what your project is about.
Fork-A copy of a repo that is yours. You can experiment with the repo however you want.
Commit-All the changes you made in your branch that are recorded.
Pull Request(PR)-It's a proposal to merge someone's commits to the main branch.
Issue-Issues are literally issues occurring in a project. It also helps maintainers track bugs, requested features, webdev mistakes, etc. If you're a beginner contributing to an open-source project, look for issues with the label "Good first issue."