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Discussion on: How to contribute to open source?

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anduser96 profile image
Andrei Gatej

Hi! I have enjoyed every single inch of this post as I've never contributed to open source before. I also have a question.

Let's say I have built an app from watching a tutorial and later on I have added my own features. Does it make sense to submit a PR with these new features?

I have decided to go with the "organic" way of contributing to open source.

Thank you for your time. Happy holidays!

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raddevon profile image
Devon Campbell

Glad you enjoyed the post, Andrei!

PRs are most useful when you're helping out with code other people maintain. A PR is basically a proposal to add some code to someone's project. They maintain the project. You have written some code you believe improves the project, but it's ultimately up to them to make the call. Hence the pull request.

When you're working on your own code, you're only going to write the code you know you want in the project, so making a pull request to yourself isn't really that useful. To add code to one of your existing projects, I'd just work on a branch until you have things the way you want them and then merge it into the master branch directly. No PR required.

Hope that helps. Happy holidays to you as well!