Why open source matters more now, and how to get started

Naor Peled — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:30:00 +0000

Open source is one of the things that helped me grow significantly in my career over the last few years.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about its importance in this GenAI era. I see a lot of value in it and think it matters even more now than it used to.
In this post, I will share my journey and point of view.

What is OSS and why should you get into it?

OSS is short for open source software, meaning software that is open to the world, where anyone can suggest changes, share thoughts on its internals, and help shape its roadmap.

On a personal and professional level, I feel that the ROI has been incredible:

I met amazing and talented people who became my close friends and taught me a lot of things that helped me grow.
I learned to embrace imperfection. We try our best to avoid mistakes, but at scale, being agile and letting go of perfection are necessary to move the needle.
I get a feeling of fulfillment from knowing I'm helping other people improve their software.
I've connected with people I might not have otherwise reached.
I gained experience with technologies I didn't get to work with at work in a meaningful way.

Why I think it matters even more now

A few reasons:

A lot of AI coding models are trained on public repositories. So when you contribute today, you're not just helping the people using the project now, your contribution helps shape the tools the next generation of engineers will build with.
When AI can generate a first draft of almost anything, the skills that stand out shift towards judgment, reviewing code you didn't write, and finding your way around large unfamiliar codebases. Open source is one of the best places to practice exactly those, on real projects with real feedback.
When you're just starting, you hit the classic catch-22: you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience. Open source is one of the few ways that helps you get out of it, you get to work on real projects, with real users and real maintainers. That's always been true, but it matters even more now that junior roles are harder to get into.

A few words about me

Hi, I'm Naor, a software engineer for the past 7 years professionally and an open source contributor/maintainer for about 6 years. I am also an AWS Community Builder in the DevTools category and love sharing insights about modern developer workflows and cloud tooling.

Some of the projects I maintain are used by tens of millions of developers weekly. You can check them out on my GitHub page.
I'm all about community and I try to go to as many meetups and conferences as possible to learn more and meet amazing people who I can potentially collaborate with.

I currently work for groundcover, where we're building a BYOC, eBPF powered observability solution. If you're into cloud native engineering or modern infrastructure, I highly recommend checking us out 😎

How my journey began

My first PRs were for fixing typos and adding translations in docs for Vue and React. Fixing a typo or correcting docs is one of the quickest and easiest ways to start contributing to open source.

In parallel to these contributions, I joined a local community for people who want to contribute to OSS. There, I found a project that had some open tasks. I asked to be assigned to one of them, and my code change ended up getting merged.

In the following year, in the company I worked for, we used several products and projects that were open source.
While working on things, I created code change requests that fixed some bugs and got merged.

In mid 2022, while working with DynamoDB, we used a project called dynamodb-toolbox that helps manage entities and query DynamoDB. As we relied on the project heavily, I wanted to take part in it and opened an issue where I asked if I could help maintain the library. After talking to the author, Jeremy, for a bit, I started co-maintaining it along with other projects that Jeremy created.
I would say that after that, the snowball effect started, and after I gained more experience co-maintaining these projects, I joined more.

Your first contribution(s)

In order to find projects to work on, I would first suggest to go for technologies you're already working with, because then you might already have pain points you would want to improve for others and yourself.
Also, I personally recommend trying to find a local open source community, where you can find people to collaborate with and get started.

Each project works differently, so I would suggest starting by looking for a CONTRIBUTING.md and reading the README. These are standard docs that provide pointers on how the project works and how it is maintained.

Once you have a bit of context on the project, I would start by looking for good first issue labeled issues, which are issues that are suited for newcomers to start with.

If you don't find any, it's okay, it doesn't mean you can't contribute at all. It just means that you would need to go through the rest of the issues and try to see if you find anything that interests you personally.

Remember that maintainers are also human beings, and their goal is for the project to succeed, so if you have any questions, opening an issue or commenting on an issue is definitely okay, you gotta start somewhere. Just be respectful, and you should be good to go.

After you find an issue or several issues that interest you, you should comment on the issue and ask to be assigned. While you're at it, feel free to ask for guidance (e.g., where to start or how to run the project locally). Open source is all about communication, so try to be as communicative as possible.

Another great way to contribute is simply by creating issues. When using a technology, feedback is always important, that's how projects grow.

My tips as a maintainer

Be patient, sometimes it takes time to be assigned or get a response, not all maintainers have a lot of time and open source is something we do during our free time, unless it's our part/full time job.
Be nice, it goes a long way.
Communicate when you're stuck, we want to help you, by helping you we're helping both sides.
The beginning might be a bit scary, BUT trust me that once you get the hang of it, it's very fun and teaches you a lot.
Nowadays, it's easy to generate code with AI, and I personally am okay with people opening PRs using it, I also use AI in my day to day. However, please make sure to thoroughly review the code you generate and ask questions if you aren't sure about anything. At the end of the day, a human maintainer is allocating their free time to review your work, so ensuring it actually makes sense is a matter of respect.

Final thoughts

Everybody starts somewhere. In open source it's all about community, learning and growing.

Shoutout to all the amazing people I met along the way.

Need guidance or just want to talk?

Feel free to reach out to me over LinkedIn, x or email me at me@naor.dev

If you enjoyed this post and want to follow along with my open source journey, feel free to follow me here and on GitHub.

Thanks for reading this! I wish you the best of luck in reaching your goals.

DEV Community: Naor Peled