How to contribute to open source on GitHub

How to make your first open source contribution:

I made my first open-source contribution this month and the experience was really refreshing.

If you want to get started with open-source here are a few steps to get that first PR merged:

1. Find a project on Github that interests you/adds value to you and start looking into it. I found this project when I was looking for ways to make a portfolio really quickly.

2. Go to the Issues tab and look for any issues that you know you can fix easily. Issues in Github are like to-do lists for that particular project.

Now is the actual execution part

3. Fork the original project to your Github profile. Now you have a copy of the original project which means you can do whatever you want with it and it won’t bother anyone.

4. Start to work on the issue you’ve chosen. This means reading the codebase and understanding the style that the author has chosen to work with. The project I contributed to used Tailwind, this meant even if I really loved Sass/Emotion/styled-components or whatever, I should put Tailwind on the top of my list. FYI, I never touched TailwindCSS before this.

5. After you’re done working on the issue and everything seems to work. Make sure you’re following all the style guidelines the author was following. Make sure your code follows at least some best practices as seen in the project. Now make your commits.

Remember, when making commits only add the modified files that relate to your commit and also write meaningful commit messages.

6. Lastly, push your commits, go to Github, to your project repo and make a pull request. You’ll either find a glowing green button or a greyed-out button that says ‘Contribute’.

After that everything is pretty much self-explanatory. So far I’ve found people to be extremely nice whenever I engage in discussions. Also, you don’t have to write rocket science to contribute, my first contribution was fixing some CSS.

Good luck and have fun!