Huge credits to Samson Goddy for this amazing talk on the 16th of April! Samson is a GitHub Star, Co-founder of an open-source community in Africa, and an open-source advocate! His open-source journey started when he was 8 years old with a Linux machine.
This article will cover most of the points mentioned in this session! I hope that it benefits those that did not have the chance to join Hashnode Bootcamp Batch lll.
Article Outline
- What is open-source about?
- Benefits of contributing to open-source
- Getting Started with open-source
- How can you contribute?
- Tips for building your own open-source projects.
- General Tips
- Resources
- Conclusion
What is open-source about?
- Based on Google, open-source is a software for which the source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Therefore, contributing to open source means that you provide your code or expertise towards an open-sourced project.
- Open-source is all about collaboration and technologies. There will be different communities for different open-source projects. That applies to the technologies used too!
- Technologies are very centered around open-source, especially in the 21st century.
Benefits of contributing to open-source
- Great community work. "Contributing to open source can be a rewarding way to learn, teach and build experience in just about any skill you can imagine."
- Learn new technologies, design screens, learn technical writing
- Connect with the community behind the project.
- Work on interesting projects
- Find yourself a mentor and career opportunity in the future.
- Flexibility of projects.
- Ability to find the thing you love, and contribute to the project where the code may be used by many people.
Getting Started With Open-source
- Find open-source projects to contribute to
- Join communities
- Find a mentor.
- Make meaningful contributions (quality> quantity)
It might give a lot of the green stuff on your GitHub, but it does not translate to good quality of code. Besides making quality code makes it easier to reference what you worked on when asked by others.
- Collaborate. Learn. Grow.
- Teach others what you know. Mentor beginners when you are experienced.
- Open source your growth.
Share your experience. Write blogs! Share content on your media! It shows people how they can work with you and provide you with opportunities in the future. It will go further than you would expect!
How can you contribute?
Go to GitHub/explore or /topics or find a good first issue (You can find the tag in issues of projects) and just search for projects that you're interested in!
Open-source side of things:
- Designer
- Researcher
- Technical Writer
- QA/Tester
- User
- Donor
- Engagement
- Product Manager
- Translator
You can contribute to open-source if you are any of the above and more!
You don't 100% have to write code!
That is why open-source gives you the sweet spot about growth and passion!
Tips for building your own open-source project
- Documentation is always IMPORTANT!!! This is the way to explain what the community is about to the external contributors in the future.
- Always make sure the documentations are simple and straightforward. This allows more people to contribute even if they are a beginner.
- Build a community around your project.
- Licensing based on your needs. There is no right license. A popular one is the MIT license.
General Tips
- Quality Contributions = People will start speaking on your behalf, your work will speak for you when the time comes.
- Network. Some of your best friends might be from open source.
- Try out open source, contribute today! you don't have to be a software engineer.
- Share it on your LinkedIn as an experience or as a voluntary project!
- To understand what the repository is going on about, look for contributing.md, the maintainer will explain steps by steps how to approach the project.
- When you first started to contribute to a project, you will definitely have to explore the docs route.
- Ask things publicly on discord or the project chat! Get feedback! Private DM is not necessarily good for networking.
Resources
- Open source guide
- Google summer of code for students in an educational setting.
- If you are independent and not in school, try Google Season On Docs. Contribute to technical writing or writing documentation.
- Outreachy program
Conclusion
Generally, open-source is an alternative or an all-in-one way for you to learn, network, and contribute to code used by many! Personally, open-source was intimidating for me, but after having my first pull request merged on GitHub, I realized it was not that hard! Just step out of your comfort zone, ask around and get your first PR merged!
Thank you for reading!
Hope you enjoyed reading this article! Don't forget to leave a reaction to boost this article! Do note that this article marks the end of my series for Hashnode Bootcamp batch lll! You can read all the other articles I wrote to summarize each session!
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