The Ultimate beginners guide to open source – Part 2: Defeating the fear of contributing

Contributing and finding repositories to contribute to is scary. If you are one of those people, I have a hack for you that is sure to help you overcome that fear.

Pick a project you want to contribute to, click on the “watch” button.

Click on _custom _ and pick the following: issues, pull request (optional) and discussions (optional).

This allows you to get notifications on any issue, pull request or discussion created in the project.

Here’s what you should do with every type of notification you get:

1. Issue: When you get an issue notification and you are interested in solving that issue, you will be among the first to view it and decide if you want to work on it, but what if you don't know how to work on that issue?

You can wait until it's allocated to someone else and then ask that person if you can collaborate; you'll make a new friend, learn, and have someone lead you through how the project works. Believe me, the open source software community is really kind.

1. Pull Request: You can review other people's work and that teaches you how to read code, which is a really useful ability to have as a programmer. You also get to view the corrections/suggestions that the maintainers have made to the code, which shows you the project's code practices and a better way of solving and doing things.

2. Discussion: You get to talk to people, ask/answer questions, and discuss the next steps needed for the project. This also gets you friends, and you get to network and better share your expertise on the knowledge you have.

The goal of picking a project to contribute to isn't to try to participate right away; instead, you should familiarize yourself with the project.

Another little tip if you are just starting with open source is to not contribute to big projects, go with projects with 20–1000 stars.

Looking for a project to practice? Try this Practice Project

See you in part 3 and check out part 1 here.

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think about this and if you would like to see more, if you think i made a mistake or missed something, don't hesitate to comment