At Women+ in Open Source Day, I got to try my hand at making a contribution to Apache Spark. While I didn’t manage to clone and build the project within the allotted time, I did get to speak with one of the project’s key contributors, Holden Karau, and was inspired by her encouragement for all sorts of people to get involved.
Contributing to open source can be intimidating! And in the age of AI, contributors from diverse perspectives are even more important.
So for our second ever Dev Discussion, we want to know: What is your advice for getting started contributing to open source projects?
Share your advice in the comments below along with links to some of your favorite open source projects! 🖥️ 🎉👇
Top comments (4)
I'd recommend looking for smaller projects to start with. Study the codebase, start small. Choose projects that you understand the language of, have clean code, are developing well, and that you'll enjoy supporting. It's a cliche, but it's one of the main reasons for contributing code.
Great advice! Are there any smaller projects you recommend?
My advice is that even contributing to documentation counts as "technical enough" and is just as important as contributing code -- so if you run into an issue while trying to follow a project's documentation, go ahead and make a pull request! Lots of people will be grateful you did ❤️
The Vonage Tooling MCP server is an awesome project for folks wanting to get their toes wet in OSS!
developer.vonage.com/en/blog/contr...