How and why did you start contributing to Open Source?

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Why aren’t you contributing to open source?

BekahHW ・ Apr 3

#codenewbie #discuss #webdev #opensource

I found the answers very interesting.

However, what would interest me even more is how and why did you start contributing to Open Source? Did you create your own project? Did you fix a bug? Did you start in an IRC channel?

Comments

[Amanda]

I started after joining the EddieHub community. To me it was always more about the people than the tech so I joined a community first versus a project. I think my first contribution was a fix to the github logo link on the LinkFree site.

[Gabor Szabo]

That looks like a nice project. Can you tell us more about EddieHub or at least about your involvement in it? (Here as comment or as a stand alone post of your)

[Amanda]

EddieHub is an inclusive community of Open Source enthusiasts from all kinds of backgrounds and levels of expertise. We collaborate on many projects, but the most popular one is LinkFree. github.com/EddieHubCommunity/LinkFree

It's a great place to make some connections and also build in a very welcoming place. My role there currently is community member, ambassador, and repository maintainer.

[Anthony Fung]

If creating a project counts as contributing, I wrote Working Files List for a few reasons:

• I couldn't find any other free Visual Studio extension like it at the time. Some of the filenames in other projects I worked on were very long, and I could only see a few at a time when they were displayed horizontally. I wanted them displayed vertically.
• I was hoping it would seem like an impressive project to go on my CV. To tell the truth, I'm not sure it made that much difference in some of the interviews I previously attended.

I personally still use it when in Visual Studio. I think someone from Microsoft liked the idea too, because a very similar tab layout was introduced in VS2019 release 16.4

[Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard]

Important question because OpenSource had a very profound impact on my career.
At some point, when I was interviewing, people told me "Oh, you are the author of refreshVersions? We use it and it's pretty cool".
And I cannot empathize enough how much this changed the conversations I had with those companies.
Suddenly I was not anymore the incompetent liar until proved otherwise.

But contributing was a long time in the making.
I was interested in the philosophy of open source long before I actually started contributing heavily.
And when I started contributing, I did lots of mistake, like a cloning a repo of perfect strangers, not talking with them, doing a huge amount of work, send a PR and hope for the best.

I gave my tips on how to do things better than that here

Can beginners make a simple but meaningful contribution? Some unconventional advice #hacktoberfest

Jean-Michel Fayard 🇫🇷🇩🇪🇬🇧🇪🇸🇨🇴 ・ Oct 1 '22 ・ 7 min read

#beginners #opensource #hacktoberfest #github

[Jonas Pfalzgraf]

I simply slipped in like that. It sounds strange now, but it's true xD . I have generally been interested in small scripts since my school days, but never really deeply. When I did my first apprenticeship, I got more and more into open source through friends and my interest in code, until I started to implement my own projects. In the meantime, I am proud of many of my projects, others I will continue to support, but I don't really have any interest in them anymore. Either way, I have found a home in the open source community and feel really comfortable ^^

[RJ White]

Hi, new guy here (to dev.to - I saw your Facebook posting to Perl Programmers).

I started contributing to OSS a decade ago, to Github.
I think it was a combination of thinking that some of the stuff I wrote for myself would be useful to others, but also to improve my image to potential employers.

That worked well because two places I was talking to (but didn't end up working for) in the last couple of years wanted code samples, and I just pointed them off to several projects I placed on Github. One place wanted 5 code samples, so I just sent them 5 links to separate projects all under my userid.

And more recently, because of my responding to a comment on a forum for service provider Zoneedit.com, the admins now point to one of my github packages on their knowledgebase as a recommended solution for DDNS updates. That wasn't planned. I think it looks a lot better that I had originally pointed some user off to Github, than some personal web-site, and it was noticed.

I should probably point out that all my contributions are just myself - 1 person projects. So I wasn't on the hook for delivering or keeping to somebody elses schedule.

[Shane Curcuru]

I started contributing last century because my paid $dayjob donated our code to the ASF, and I got assigned "figure out how this ASF model works, so our team looks good".

I found the way open source communities valued clear communications and helpful, actual content to be refreshing, and once I started going to ApacheCon (now called Community Over Code), I met a bunch of new friends from around the world and across different companies.

When my dayjob transitioned to a new project, I kept volunteering in my spare time.

[Paweł Świątkowski]

As far as I remember, it was fixing a bug. Quite specific one, because it only happened on Windows with Polish locale and in a certain timezone.

[michTheBrandofficial]

My first and still in progress was building a JavaScript framework,
NixixJS, for the fun of it and to understand the magic behind popular ones.

The project is currently not popular and has not-so-good documentation(working on it😅), but it can do some pretty quick HTML rendering, manage state with signals, and has a ref API(not filled with features yet) and supports TypeScript out of the box👍.