How to start contributing in open source project

shaikhul

Shaikhul Islam

Posted on February 28, 2019

How to start contributing in open source project

Here are my stories of getting involved in open source projects.

January 2017

I was frustrated with the almost no doc of hamcrest-php matchers, each time I wanted to use a matcher I have to look through the code, some of my office colleagues were also frustrated, I initially wrote down some matchers example and later thought this would be a great fit to add it in the doc, I updated the README file, open a PR and it eventually got merged!

March 2017

We use Phake mocking library heavily in our tests. In one case I found a method isn't working as expected in this issue, I opened a PR and added a comment in the issue. Even though I opened the PR back in March 2016, it actually got merged in March 2017!

June 2017

This time add test coverage on PHP source! I attended a php conference in Atlanta, GA on May, 2017. Inspired by this talk, I opened a PR that added tiny test coverage, it got a vetting before getting merged!

My recommendations for future open source contributors

  1. Start with documentation, even if fixing a typo! Best way to start is look into your favorite framework/library/packages/whatever and see how you can contribute.

  2. Check existing issues to see if there is anything that you can work on.

  3. You don't need to be ninja/expert to contribute! There are places for everyone to contribute something/somehow that would help others.

Believe yourself and start contributing!

💖 💪 🙅 🚩
shaikhul
Shaikhul Islam

Posted on February 28, 2019

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