My early days of coding:
During my early days of learning to code I used watch many YouTube videos on how contributing to opensource projects can help you practically apply what you've learned and even has the potential to skyrocket your career as a software developer by demonstrating your contributions to opensource projects.
Since then I started reading "Get started with GitHub documentation" on GitHub. I spent days after days and nights to make my first contribution. Even after a long time(months went on) I wasn't able to make contribution. It only made me more frustrated and anxious.
What went wrong and Why couldn't I do it ?
The thing I understood is contribution to opensource projects are at level 1. Me learning to code was at level 0. My mistake was trying to do both in parallel which only left me exhausted because I haven't yet learned the skills in level 0 completely which will eventually allows me to do the next big thing which is in level 1.
Then how to do it ?
Simple.
If you're in the process of learning a programming language do not try to do opensource contribution or even anything, until you finish what you have started.
As the saying goes....
"Acts must be carried through to their completion,
Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful.
It is (only) because an action has not been completed that it is vile."
-Jean Genet, from Thief's Journal
Once you completed learning programming language the next best thing to do is to start working on small scale projects. Then proceed to medium and big ones. By this time you should have a clear understanding of how software project is developed, tested and deployed.
Finally you can get into making your first open source contribution. And here's some websites that help do that are
https://www.firsttimersonly.com/ and https://goodfirstissue.dev
Another best practice is to get in touch with the maintainers and the development team through Discord, Gitter, Slack, Mailing list, twitter space etc...
Always remember
"Your code matters! Keep exploring, learning, and coding for a collaborative tech future. Happy coding, beginners!"
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