Over $400,000 Went to Stellar Contributors This Year.

This year, the Stellar ecosystem pivoted towards supporting open source contributions. If you've never contributed to open source, you couldn't have picked a better time to get started.

In January, Drips launched its Wave program with Stellar. Each month, for an 8–10 day period, developers resolve issues in selected GitHub repos, and everyone gets paid in USDC based on the issues they closed. The first four waves paid out ~$250,000, while the most recent one had over 700 contributors across 500+ repos.

Next, GrantFox arrived to fill the space OnlyDust left behind. Here, projects post work for contributors to claim and get paid in USDC after their work is accepted. Their first two campaigns put up over $75,000.
Altogether, over $400,000 in USDC has been disbursed to contributors on Stellar this year, with more to come in the coming months.

This guide will walk you through contribution basics: what counts as a contribution, how to select issues that suit you, and what good contributors do differently.

Firstly, you don't have to write code.

This is usually what stops more people than anything else. From having a misconception that contributing to OSS only involves writing code, to being afraid of writing shitty code in someone else's repo. But before we address the latter, let's discuss what counts as contributions. "Contributing" is a whole category of activities that encompasses the following:

• Documentation: improving unclear explanations, stale sections, and providing missing examples. This is usually the most needed work in almost every organisation's repos, including Stellar's.
• Bug reports: finding something broken and writing it up clearly.
• Bug fixes
• Writing tests
• Adding new features
• Design and UX contributions

Finding the right issue

Look for issues that are at the intersection of these three things:

1. Your stack: For code contributions, your first contribution shouldn't also be your first day with the programming language. Let the process be the new thing you're learning, not the language, too.

2. Your skill level: For a newbie, you want to filter for issues containing the "good first issues" label, until you have a hang of the project you are contributing to.

3. Your interest: You're doing this in your free time, and sometimes, attention runs out fast on unrewarded work. Look for projects and issues that you already have an interest in.

It is very important to avoid overreaching on your first contributions. Say you're ambitious and looking to get noticed by the maintainers, so you pick something hard, and then you get stuck. And because you want to ship by yourself with any means necessary, you paste the whole thing into an LLM and submit whatever comes out.

Now you've submitted a PR that you know nothing about. And during review, when the maintainer questions your approach, as they often do, you will have no justification. At this point, you've gotten noticed, alright, but not in the way you intended.

This is not to discourage you from taking on difficult issues or using AI tools. But only do that when you have a decent understanding of the repo. This way, when you get stuck, you can communicate that properly to fellow contributors or the maintainers, and they can easily guide you to finding a solution yourself.

Conversely, you want to avoid underreaching and going for easy issues all the time. PRs comprising things like typo fixes are safe and feel productive, until months later, you realise that you have a lot of merged PRs and still haven't learned anything since the first one. You should always aim for issues you are at least 60% confident about. Uncomfortable enough to teach you something, but achievable enough that you'll finish.

What good contributors do differently

• Read the repo's rules first. CONTRIBUTING.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md tell you the conventions and how to approach contributing.
• Ask before you start. Comment on the issue, wait to be assigned. If someone's already on it, find another. And if anything happens to stall you, letting them know you are unassigning yourself lets someone else pick it up.
• One fix per PR. Fixing a bug? Fix only the bug. Reviewers must understand your whole diff before approving. Multiple unrelated changes mean more work to review, which could cause your PR to sit for a while.
• Name your branches and commits clearly. Follow the repo's convention. Most projects use Conventional Commits.
• Write a PR description that does some of the reviewer's work for them. Your description should include what changed, why, which issue it resolves, how you verified it, and a screenshot if visual.
• Reviews are not rejections. Everyone gets change requests, including experienced contributors. If a review comment confuses you, be sure to communicate that. If you disagree, explain your reasoning, then you may defer.
• Be someone people want to work with. Always thank reviewers and endeavour to help out other contributors.

Usually, the developers who get pulled into paid work and receive recommendations aren't always the most technically capable, but the ones who are easy to work with.

Where to ask when you're stuck

Why Contribute?

• A public record that beats any CV. This matters most for people with no formal credentials to point at.
• You learn how real software works. Tutorials teach syntax, but contributing teaches you how large codebases are organised and what production quality actually means.
• Money, of course. Between Drips and GrantFox, this is now paid work. And it compounds as time goes on, because your reputation determines what you get assigned next.
• The network. The people reviewing your PRs are the people building this ecosystem. That's how developers end up with jobs, grants, and co-founders, by being visibly valuable.
• A path to funding your own project.

Start this week

1. Get one PR merged. Go to the issues dashboard, filter for 'good first issue', find one that fits your stack, and comment to claim it.
   Paid platforms have maintainers who check your GitHub profile before assigning anything. An empty profile may get passed over, but two or three merged PRs change that. Do the free ones, then go earn.

2. You can claim issues on GrantFox at any time and get paid while waiting for the next Drips wave to open.

3. Don't do it alone. The Builder's Circle is where Stellar Nigeria builds together. We provide support for builders, with a monthly reward pool to earn from while you learn and contribute, and a direct pipeline into SCF funding for your project.

Apply now.