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How to Make Your First Open Source Contribution

Ceora Ford on May 06, 2021

Open source software is a huge part of the tech industry. Over and over, we hear about the power of open source. In episode 2 of The CodeSandbox Po...
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Christima Mary S

Hey, I have just made my very first open-source contribution. Thank you so much for sharing🤩

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Ceora Ford

I’m soooo so hoppy to hear that!! Congrats🥳🥳

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Jakub Narębski

One thing of note: unless the commit in question is a very simple one, so that its description fits within single line of the commit message, it would be better to use git commit (or git commit -a) instead of git commit -m '<commit message>'.

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Shubhendra Singh Chauhan • Edited

This is really good, and I believe it will help a lot of folks who want to know how they can use git and GitHub to start making their first Open-Source contribution. ✨

Kudos, @ceeoreo 👏 Also, you mentioned Good first issues, so I'd like to share about Goodfirstissue.dev - which is a platform that has a listing of popular Open-Source projects with "Open" Good first issues. So whether you're making your first contribution or want to work on beginner-friendly issues, you will find a project there. You can also list your own project if it has some open good first issues. 😃

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Ceora Ford

Oh this is great!! Thanks for sharing😊

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Andras Bacsai

Great write-up, Ceora! I wish I had something similar when I started to contribute to opensource projects.

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Ceora Ford

Ah thank you😊 and same here!

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Sreekar Guddeti

Thank you for the wonderful article :smile. I recently submitted my first PR on GitHub docs a few days back and am excited to contribute more to the open source multiverse. While I am on it, may I suggest some typos in the current article:

  1. In the Section titled "Find a project you feel comfortable working on", "...If this is the case, check for Issues..."
  2. In the Section titled "Communication guidelines", "...These can usually the be found in the README.md or CONTRIBUTING.md file..."
  3. In the Section titled "Commit and push your changes ", "...Once your you are sure that your code is functioning as desired, you can commit and push your changes to GitHub..."
  4. In Section titled "Create a pull request", "...Maintainers will probably have a good reason for doing this and it's likely that they will let you know..."

Please feel free to review them :smile

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Jakub T. Jankiewicz

Great article, I would add the missing copy repo URL screenshot.

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Ceora Ford • Edited

Ah yes good point! I’ll add it as soon as I get the chance👍🏾

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charly3pins

Really great article! A lot of tops brillianlty explained and distilled for the new contriburors.

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Ceora Ford

Thank you!😊

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ven

Thank you for the post, I was able to submit my first PR for hacktoberfest with the help of this article.

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Ceora Ford

I'm so happy to hear that!! Hopefully this is the first of many! :)))

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Cynthia Mbulu

Feel super excited to contribute to my first open source project now that I've watched your video. Thank you so much, it was very easy to understand and helpful :))

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Martin Thuo

Thank you.

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