7 out of 10 developers contribute to open source and here are some tips and suggestions on how to get started
It’s no secret that Open Source contribution is one of the most sought after skills in tech. In addition to the employment benefits, there are other advantages such as
- Learning and sharing knowledge
- Build and improve your brand’s visibility
- Collaboration and communication with other developers through code reviews and discussions
- Giving back to the community ❤
- Connect with like minded people, find your employee/employees, co-founder, mentor, mentee
According to Eclipse Foundation, Open Source has seen massive investment in recent years.
Why should you care?
Looking back to the 2016 StackOverflow survey, there is no mention of open source at all however, in 2017 survey around 32.7% of respondents claimed to contribute to open source and this figure increased by nearly 10% (to 43.6%) in 2018 survey and what is even more interesting is that the % of contributors rose by 20% in 2019 (to 63.3%).
According to a 2016 Future of Open Source Survey Results by BlackDuck around 67% of participation in open source has been to
- Fix bugs
- Add new features
59% of developers participate in open source to gain competitive edge.
Taking into account the above facts, figures and trends, IMO it’s worth considering open source contribution.
Be the change that you wish to see in the world — Mahatma Gandhi
Reasons why I failed to contribute earlier?
A majority of us developers love to contribute to open source but, we end up failing to do so for a variety of reasons. Here is a listing of reasons for me
- A majority of educational institutions neither recognize open source contribution as an effective way to learn nor motivate the students to participate — IMO, open source contribution should be part of the curriculum (as assignment, project, etc).
- Your geographical location — IMO the country you live in also plays a vital role as highlighted in this article.
- New year resolution & birthday promises — I have had countless of these but, they never really worked.
- Unrealistic goals — I once decided that I will do at least twenty (20) pull requests to repository such as docker (because I ❤ docker) without taking into account the fact that I did not have the adequate knowledge to do so.
- Job, side projects and life excuses — Following every failure to contribute, I would consult myself that I am doing well in other verticals.
No matter how small the contribution, if you do it on a regular basis it does make a difference in the long run.
- Underestimating my abilities — At times I have looked into existing pull requests and issues and arrived to the conclusion that “This is complex”.
- Ignoring documentation issues — A majority times I have ignored all the documentation related issues.
My employers didn't care — I would love a job that requires contributing back to the open source community.
Procrastination — Definitely a factor for a variety of reasons.
These are some of the main reasons that stopped me from getting started with open source contribution early on.
My Motivation
The main motivation to contribute to open source for me was to become knowledgeable enough to write about it.
I have a strong emphasis on knowledge sharing and this is something that I try to do both personally as well as at work in team and organisation level.
I was working on a side project last year and I learned a few things about encryption, so I wrote about it here. Few months down the road, I helped write our company’s coding guidelines and used the knowledge to write an article about it as well.
After two articles, I wanted to write about something that I regarded as really important for new devs and students (Medium version, not metered).
The community loved ❤ the article and received around ~50K views, many thousand claps and comments of appreciation (In Medium - prior to their Paywall).
The next big article for me was to write about open source contribution (this article) and for that I needed to make a few open source contributions first.
So if you find yourself in the same boat of wanting to contribute and have not yet then, look for that one reason, motivation, purpose, drive, whatever it is.
My Contribution Strategy
I decided that I will contribute to a Spring Framework, a library that I have used before. I was reading the Contribution Guidelines when I noticed a few broken links so, I created a pull request to fix them.
The pull request got merged and it felt so good that I decided to keep going however, there was a problem. A majority of GitHub issues (i.e. bugs, first-timer, help-needed, feature) would get picked by other contributors before I even have a chance to express interest.
Whenever a process does not produce the desired result for me, I make a change and re-evaluate the results and continue this way until the results are desirable.
Here is what I did
- I subscribed (watched) to the Spring repository
- On my way to work, I would browse through email notifications and show interest via comment on issues that I could tackle
As a result of this strategy, I had a pool of issues to work on. The first enhancement feature
Add Clear Site Data to Log Out
#4187
We should investigate adding Clear Site Data to Spring Security's LogoutHandler implementations. See https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-clear-site-data/
and the pull request for it
Add Support for Clear Site Data on Logout
#6550
This PR adds support for Clear Site Data HTTP response header. See the issue for more details.
Fixes #4187
I continued in this fashion on a few other issues of type enhancement, bugs and new features resulting in the following PRs
- Add placeholder support for header tag attributes — Spring Security
- Add configuration properties for remaining Undertow — Spring Boot
- Ensure Qualifier with bean name is evaluated when using SpyBean — Spring Boot — Declined
- Convert PluginPropertiesExtension Groovy to Java — ElasticSearch
- Added Support for RFC 8414 OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server Metadata — Spring Security
So, if you are struggling to find issues to work on, pivot to a different strategy.
Tips and Suggestions
Based on my knowledge and experience so far
- Participate in Hacktoberfest
- A must-read guide on “how to contribute”
- Learn Git basics
- Pick a language i.e. Java, JavaScript
- Identify repositories that welcome contributions — Use tools such as CodeTriage, Github Explorer and this
- Read the repository policies i.e. contribution guidelines
- Learn the project you want to contribute to
- Contribute in the form of code, documentation, bugs, and new features
- Filter issues based on labels such as help-needed, bug, first-timers, etc.
- Be mindful of others time specially maintainers who help you
- Ensure you have the necessary skills and time to invest
- Follow the discussions in issues and pull requests, see the code changes
- Be patient and open to feedback
I picked an Elastic Search issue and ignored the fact that I needed to know some Groovy and how Elastic Search build worked as a consequence I spent a lot more time and effort in getting the PR to completion stage.
It’s always a good idea to do some research before opting to work on an issue.
Recommended Reading
I would highly encourage you to read the open source guide, and this article that comes with a wealth of knowledge on how to get started. This article highlights some good tips and if you are a visual person then these videos by Kent C. Dodds might be helpful.
I saw this article on Open Source Contribution on Jan 27, 2020 and find it to be a helpful and relevant read.
Thank you for reading. Please feel free to follow me on here for more articles, connect on LinkedIn and other social media platforms of your choice.
If this article in any manner helped you in making your first contribution, then you are welcome to share your ideas, suggestions, feedback and pull request as a comment.
Latest comments (40)
Rafiullah Hamedy, thank you for the insightful article!
The company I am working at, in January-February 2020 starts the open-source project for Node.js developers (microservices)!
Warm welcome🥳
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manual.youngapp.co/community-edition/ (docs)
github.com/youngapp/yap(docs)
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Contributing to Open Source overall is good because, after trimming all the BS, in the end:
On the other side, the price you pay to keep the job or being employed is:
Amazing!
For me the easy entry point for contributing to big projects was to improve their documentation. There is always a typo, a missing code example or just uncovered sections and the chances for an accepted PR are very high because there is usually not so much debate about the "why" in contrast to PRs on new features.
For me the difficult thing is to decide what to contribute to, so to choose a project. And what's the "best" (?) strategy - focus on "one big thing" or divide your time over multiple projects? But in the end it all doesn't matter really, as long as you do something.
By the way the statistics are interesting and impressive - more than 60% contributing to OSS (compared to a few years ago).
I am confused by the title of this article. The phrase "you should think twice about it" means you shouldn't do it--i.e., if you think you should do it, you should think again. (I came here to angrily retort at you, haha.) But you are clearly pro open source. So the article should be titled "Why You Shouldn't Think Twice About Contributing to Open Source," or else "Why You Should Contribute to Open Source."
I agree, by the way. Not only is open source is a great way give something back to the community, but it helps you build networks with competent developers and it gets your work out there. It's totally worth the time.
I have wanted to contribute to a few open source project for a while. I hope to start by the end of this year. Thanks for writing an inspiration.
Well, you could join the #hacktoberfest hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com movement to get started with open source contribution.
If you want to get money for your contributions, then have a look at issuehunt.io/
Thanks for sharing it!
But that was not the point, I am already making money working real jobs, or I can find another consulting side-project...
But forcing to have in resume contributions in open sources, it reminds me the "free voluntary" labor work during the cold war in eastern Europe.
As I said, on the other side, just like certificates nowadays are almost mandatory to show "continuous education", contributing on open sources, is not that different.
Thank you for sharing this Bimba! StackOverflow has a similar model but, the reward is in points.
Gotta say I did not get it until I tried it. The resulting feeling was as good as most recreational drugs!
Especially when/if the projects devs acknowledge you in credits.
Feeling jaded ? Review your contrib comments to brighten that Jade!
I like Jade though ...
In the past of five years, I don't know about open source contributions.
In 2016, I looked for the open source projects on GitHub and start my open source contributions from then on.
You're right. Sometimes I learn new things and collaborate with developers on GitHub. It helps me a lot when I work some codes in my company.
I also have the plan to separate my company projects/packages to open source projects.
And I also thanks for my project manager to support this work.
Thank you Peter for sharing your experience. I agree with you the earlier the better. The few contributions that I have had helped me learn a few things such as
It's definitely a great benefit to be in a company and accompany of those who appreciate and support you to contribute to open source.
All in all, there are a good amount of learning opportunities.