What’s the meaning of contribution to open source projects?

Mourad Bougarne — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 03:55:30 +0000

I’ve planned this year to start a series of articles about creating Nuxt app (Universal /PWA) using different back-end ExpressJS or maybe KoaJS and Lumen (Laravel Micro-framework), but while I’m surfing Facebook yesterday evening (Wednesday) a post popup in front of me published on a private group for PHP developer in my country (PHP Maroc).

One of the admins published a post about some advices/recommendations for the new developer in 2020 how they can start? One of those advises is Contribute on open source projects which is the last point in the list. The magic happens when a member in the group asked why? About Contribute on open source projects for the newcomers, in a series of comment he labeled and classed the contribution to just pro level, as below:

yes, but the post talk about what a beginner should do it's better to focus on the abilities and framework contributing needs a pro level.

I hope that they didn’t get mad at me to take their comments

I’m not against what they said if we enclose the contribution to just in coding which in my opinion isn’t true, that’s what takes me to ask:

What’s the meaning of contribution to open source community?
It is just about coding and technical stuff?
How to contribute to the community?

I believe that the contribution to open source community not just about coding nor it's confined to TOP LEVEL, you may be a newbie and you’ll find a bug, help in fixing a bug, give a line of code that help in a project, provide an idea, a feedback, answer questions, so on...

The open source community not just about programming nor it is labeled for: Top, master, seniors and the list goes on... It is about passion to help in many aspects, you didn’t need to be a pro to contribute to a project I’m not talking about coding or technical part, for sure to add extra features or improve performance of a lib, framework... need some skills, but as I said early there’s a lot of part in how to contribute and it isn't confined in coding. In fact, I advise anyone newbies or pro alike to take a time to read source code of some projects, it’s a great place to improve/aspiring yourself.

How to contribute to the community?

I see that you don’t need to be proficient in a programming language or programming in general to help, yes you can contribute even if you just start, there’s a lot to help with, you can help with a lot and this is my list:

Give feedback and share your ideas with community in how to improve the project Report the bugs.
Try to give answers about issues and open threads, you might be beginner but there’s a chance that you came into that issue and have a solution.
Funding, a lot of project need sponsored to move forward you can contribute by donation.
Promote and spread the word about that project to make its community grow.
Be a beta user, it’s like giving feedback or report bugs but with the upcoming version.
Make the project wiki richer, translate it to your mother tongue or other language that you speak.

You can contribute with different aspects not just coding, thanks a lot to the developers who spent a lot of time in the technical part but you /we can give them a hand and help in other parts.

The image source Pexels by Evgeniy Grozev

Programmers and Documentations

Mourad Bougarne — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 02:06:22 +0000

It's my first post here besides I'm not good in writing introduction and I don't blog for a long time, but I will start with some questions before that I want to give a brief about who I am?

A full stack developer in PHP and JavaScript:

PHP: (Vanilla: Design Patterns, OOP, PDO - MySQL), Laravel ecosys
JavaScript:
- Front-end: Vue(Vuex, Vuetify and Nuxt)
- Back-end: Node/Express/MongoDB
- Mobile: Ionic

I just start learning Python for a month a go, now the questions are:

It is okay to stuck with docs?
Doesn't back to'em about anything considered a bad practice?
Can you accept a job offer although you using docs when you coding or google about issues/bugs that you facing?

I mean you as a programmer/developer or even engineer is it okay for you to go back to docs of languages/frameworks/technologies that you use? I'm kinda feel ashamed when I can't remember about: functions, APIs... then go to official website and start reading about it, a lot of time doing this to the same thing that I searched about it before as example in Laravel, I can't move on from authorization/queues/testing each time I want to use them in a project I back to docs for help, the samething with Vuex especially for Mutations and Actions without talking about Node and mongo.

I don't know but I feel that isn't a good thing and because of that I canceled job offers. I just want your thought about it.

Thank You.

DEV Community: Mourad Bougarne

What’s the meaning of contribution to open source projects?

How to contribute to the community?

Programmers and Documentations