A year ago, during one of the hottest days at the end of May, I found myself preparing to give a lecture about how to be part of the software community in front of CS students. There were a lot of things I wanted to talk about. One of them was open source, but I didn’t know where this road would lead me to.
A journey that made the Pull Request community alive.
When people talk about contributing to open source, they often think that it means that:
contribution to open source == merge a PR to project without any profit.
I'm here to say: "that’s not true!".
You can think about open source as a separate civilization, and as one, the first thing you should do is to adopt its code of conduct and form of thinking.
so what are the main ideas behind the code of conduct and the way of thinking? I can think of three.
Don’t wait until someone else finds the bug and fix the problem, if you see a bug and you can fix it - just fix it and open a PR.
If you see a problem that you can't fix, for any reason, open an issue about it in the project’s repository. this is very helpful to the project and its maintainers.
However, similar to cities, consider your PRs like a change to the city’s side roads, you probably need to let the city’s council (the maintainers) know about the changes you would like to commit into the project before you put all your effort into building something that will not be approved in the end.
In the open source civilization, the libraries and projects are our cities, the maintainers are the municipalities, and the Github issues pages are the call centers. Like in real cities, you can just live there, or you can take part in the community.
It's your choice. 🙂
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