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Contributing to Open Source

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Hey! Are you looking for a project to contribute to? How about contributing to Stack For Yourself?

Open source contributions are basically when people share code they’ve written with others, who can use that code for free (although licensing has an effect on what you can do with open source code). This project is open source, for example. It’s what makes it possible for you to take a copy of this project, make some changes, and request that those changes be merged into the main project branch.

Opensource.guide is a great series of guides to helping you get started with open source, whether as a creator or a contributor.

This site is written on technologies that are open-sourced, Ruby and Jekyll to name a few. So open source code is a way to contribute to the world’s codebase as well as a way to showcase your work.

Open source contributions tend to take the form of contributing your work to projects that are already available, but you can also write code for other people to use, for example making a Ruby gem.

Girl Develop It put together a great presentation on the topic, get the PDF here.

An essential element of open source contributions is a grasp of git and Github.

Find projects to contribute to

You can figure out where software is needed that you can then build, especially if you work around others.

Start your own projects for others to contribute to

You can use tools others have built, such as open source APIs, to create new awesome things. Find more ideas and build your own portfolio of work.