Whether you’re curious about open source or wondering how to make a meaningful impact, this post guides you through the process. You’ll learn why contributing is important, discover the different ways to get involved, and find practical steps to take your first contribution.
Why?
First of all, why should you contribute to open source?
Giving back
Everyone, from freelance engineers to Big Tech companies and even governments, uses Open Source Software (OSS). Some use it less, others more, but almost everyone depends on it in one way or another. Most of us are consumers of open source.
Contributing to OSS means giving something back. This is especially important given the many cases of projects (e.g nginx-ingress, external-secrets) being deprecated due to maintainer burnout, lack of community support, or overwhelming workloads.
It is true that some OSS projects are backed by large companies and maintained by engineers who are paid to work on them. However, the half of open source projects are still maintained by individuals in their spare time for free (source).
In this sense, contributing to OSS can be seen as a form of digital volunteering. Some companies (Criteo, Futurice) even offer paid volunteer time (VPTO) specifically for open-source contributions.
Learning
Another strong reason to contribute to open source is personal growth.
Every contribution becomes a learning opportunity because it places you inside a real, production-grade codebase rather than a controlled tutorial environment. You learn how projects are structured, how architectural decisions are made, how backward compatibility is maintained, and how trade-offs are handled in practice. Often this means working with unfamiliar tools, languages, or ecosystems, which naturally expands your technical range.
At the same time, open source strongly develops communication and collaboration skills. Issues and pull requests force you to articulate problems clearly, propose solutions in a way others can evaluate, and explain why a particular approach makes sense. Feedback from maintainers and contributors exposes you to different perspectives and constraints, requiring you to adapt, clarify, and sometimes rethink your ideas.
Because most collaboration happens asynchronously and in writing, you also improve your ability to communicate precisely and concisely. Over time, this structured, public collaboration sharpens how you discuss technical topics, handle reviews, and work effectively with distributed teams. These are the same skills required in modern engineering organizations, making open source a highly practical training ground.
Networking and professional reputation
Open source contribution naturally leads to networking, even if you are not actively trying to “network.” By participating in issues, code reviews, and pull requests, you start interacting with maintainers and contributors from different companies, countries, and levels of seniority. Over time, these repeated interactions build familiarity and trust. People begin to recognize your name, your areas of expertise, and the quality of your work.
Regular contributions can turn these lightweight interactions into professional relationships. Maintainers may invite you to collaborate more closely, grant you additional responsibilities, or even recommend you for roles on their teams. In many cases, job opportunities arise not from formal applications, but from someone already knowing how you work.
Another important, and often underestimated, benefit of open source contribution is visibility. Most professional work is hidden behind NDAs and internal repositories, making it difficult to demonstrate your real impact. Open source work, on the other hand, is public by default. Your commits, pull requests, discussions, and design decisions are all visible and attributable to you.
This public track record allows you to clearly show not only what you built or improved, but also how you collaborate, communicate, and respond to feedback. For recruiters and hiring managers, this is far more convincing than a list of skills on a résumé. In practice, open source contributions often function as a living portfolio and a long-term investment in your professional reputation.
How?
Now that you understand why contributing matters, let’s look at how to get started.
The Natural way
You might think that contributing to open source requires skills you do not have, a brilliant idea for a new library, or deep expertise in a specific domain. These beliefs often make OSS contribution feel unreachable.
That is not the case.
You do not need a revolutionary idea or special credentials. If you are an engineer who already writes code, you are capable of contributing.
Here is a simple approach: the next time you are solving a problem using an open source tool and notice that it does not work as expected (a bug) or lacks a feature you need, do not immediately abandon the tool. Use your skills, and an LLM if needed, to investigate and try to fix the issue.
If you succeed, open a pull request to the upstream repository. If you do not, create an issue and share your findings. That is still a contribution, and you will have learned something in the process.
Good first issue
If everything you use works perfectly and you do not notice any gaps, you can take a more deliberate approach.
Make a list of projects you like, use, or want to learn more about. Browse their open issues and look for ones labeled “good first issue” or similar. Pick something that matches your current skill level and try to tackle it.
If your list is short or you cannot find suitable issues, there are also curated lists of projects actively looking for contributors.
Summary
Open source is great, but keeping it that way requires people to contribute.
It is not hard or unreachable. Anyone can do it, and the community needs more people like you.
Start small, pick a project you love, and take your first step
Top comments (0)