I'm an official contributor to the core React repo, as evidenced here.
But my contribution was literally updating a conference calendar which was hardcoded on the React website and had become out of date. I Googled around for relevant React conferences and changed a markdown file. The website is no longer even part of that repo if I'm not mistaken.
It was hardly a technical contribution to any great extent, but in making the PR I got to learn how the React pull request process works and got some experience in making an actual PR to an actual big open source project.
I recall having a fairly low-level PR I wanted to make to Ruby on Rails. This one was most-certainly technical. But I got a bit lazy once it came to trying to understand the process of making a PR and ultimately lost interest. I bet that had I already had the experience of submitting to that project, I would have ultimately gotten around to submitting to Rails.
I see little things like this happen all the time. Especially when new and/or popular projects are open sourced. Spelling mistakes, grammar checks, etc. and you see the Tweets -> "I'm a contributor to X!".
It's not a small thing, it does in fact help. Every PR that is merged or even not merged in fact helps a project.
I'm an official contributor to the core React repo, as evidenced here.
But my contribution was literally updating a conference calendar which was hardcoded on the React website and had become out of date. I Googled around for relevant React conferences and changed a markdown file. The website is no longer even part of that repo if I'm not mistaken.
It was hardly a technical contribution to any great extent, but in making the PR I got to learn how the React pull request process works and got some experience in making an actual PR to an actual big open source project.
I recall having a fairly low-level PR I wanted to make to Ruby on Rails. This one was most-certainly technical. But I got a bit lazy once it came to trying to understand the process of making a PR and ultimately lost interest. I bet that had I already had the experience of submitting to that project, I would have ultimately gotten around to submitting to Rails.
I see little things like this happen all the time. Especially when new and/or popular projects are open sourced. Spelling mistakes, grammar checks, etc. and you see the Tweets -> "I'm a contributor to X!".
It's not a small thing, it does in fact help. Every PR that is merged or even not merged in fact helps a project.
Issues too! Discussions etc.
and blog posts, articles, and tutorials about it!