Love how short yet detailed this is, not a 10-20 minute to an hour video, not a whole lecture/series, just straight to the point

time is precious. Glad you liked it.

Exactly this. Thanks for pointing it out. And to ya my man for the video

Ngl

@@AskCloudTech This video is very good, could you make one on how to use git, and explain the fork and so on? please

Exactly, it seems that every video on youtube now is 10 minutes long and has like 2 minutes of relevant content. This one, though, is good and short. Subscribed :D

I agree, if I could start my journey over I would jump straight into Open source and treat that as my ‘projects’ vs building things on your own. Because not only are you contributing but you’re also working with others as a team. Most definitely will look good on your resume and you will for sure meet mentors and high name tech contributors and even get paid through open source. Would encourage anyone starting out to prioritize open source over building things or a portfolio for a job

Yes exactly! The type of experience you can get by working on projects that are already established and somewhat unfamiliar to you is so valuable. Starting a job working on a new codebase will be way easier because you’ve exercised that muscle working on open source projects

@@thewillderness7852 1. Literally no software you produce on your own will make you rich unless it's some shitty mobile app. 2. Some of us prefer volunteering our time towards projects that are useful for everyone and guarenteed to not have any shitty monitoring, DRM, etc., large projects always need help. 3. Due to #2, it's significantly more fun than coming up with stuff on your own, besides, all of the heavy lifting has been done for you.

@@colbyboucher6391 1. It's the marketing that largely decides that. 2. Personal preference 3. Personal preference. Some of us enjoy innovating a little more from scratch.

You're not wrong. Open source is more valuable compared to building things when it comes to resumes and looking for jobs. But it's so much more fun to do stuff on your own, where you have 100% creative freedom and no BS politics, red tape, legacy etc. Sure people in Corpo world will be more impressed if I can manage these issues in open source rather than just build stuff on my own stuff, but hey why would I fight with that in my free time, when I have to do it anyways at work.

Contributing is fun, it's nice to be part of a project used by thousands of people

Totally agree!

@@EverRusting must be js developer 😬

@@EverRusting agreed, some even accept stupid prs and reject the useful one. There's a pr in a particular project which spammed time.sleep(), which got accepted, but the pr that refactored the codebase and made significant improves, gets ignored. This is really outrageous.

Really it is !

@@EverRusting I didn't make that experience and I would highly doubt bad experiences like you sadly made are the norm. For me, I only contributed once, as I rather like to work on some personal projects in my free time. However, directly writing to the main dev of a huge utility I love on discord and figuring out some stuff, then creating a PR and see your changes solve an issue other people have is amazing. Most people are pretty chill and glad that you want to help.

I think you forgot step 0 when contributing code: Leave a comment on any issue you want to fix, state clearly that you would like to contribute a solution, and ASK(!) if a maintainer is there and willing to review/accept your work. It usually doesn't take long to get a response, gives you a general sense of the pace at which the repo operates, and saves you from contributing to dormant projects. For the first PR it will take a couple of days to set up a dev environment, get familiar with the tooling, understand the test-suite, etc. Nothing takes the wind out of your sails faster than putting in those days of work just to see the PR sitting there for months with no feedback and no merge. So before you start, make sure you have talked to maintainers (like me) before you airdrop a PR. We don't want your work to sit around and collect dust, but unfortunately, most of us have to split our time between the project and a regular job. Having clear communication on this from the start goes a long way in having fun with open source :)

Hi, I'm just getting into coding myself, been doing some work on my own to prepare for some classes I have coming up in the fall (preparing for these community college classes by watching cs50 from Harvard lol, kinda feels like overkill but I don't like surprises and I want to excel at this.) So I understand the basics, but have only a little actual on hand experience (I've done all the programs provided in cs50, have bought a couple books on making games in Python and have coded some simple games, as well as currently working on building my own chess game just as a fun starter project and as an exercise in problem solving with code.) As someone who seems well versed in this area, do you have any tips for getting into this, like places I should start or where my minimal skills could be best put to use? I'm very good with the English language so I feel myself naturally drawn to documentation and editing, which was brought up in the video, and I think that would be an excellent place to start. Any advice, including any projects you yourself could use such help on, will be greatly appreciated!

yes. All good advice. thanks!

@@firefoxmetzger9063 A very good advice. Thank you. I would like to make my first open source contribution

This. I was taken back when he said to just go ahead with contributing to a project without contacting the people that maintain it. I would never go ahead without first contacting the person that maintain a project because they may not want or need help.

Timestamps for those interested: 0:00 - Why contribute? 0:44 - Finding a project and an issue 1:33 - Read the rules 1:46 - Form the project, make a branch 2:03 - Feeding the YouTube algorithm 2:08 - Make your changes 2:23 - Push your changes 2:28 - Open a PR that resolves the issue 2:47 - Monitor and receive feedback gracefully 3:05 - Signing off

Thanks!

My guy went the open source way on YouTube lol

it's only 3min long 😂

@@PossumMedic still cool to see chapters with the youtube chapter feature + in this day and age everything longer than a tik tok is already very long ;)

@@AskCloudTech Add it in the description so youtube can section the video :)

Honestly, I think the more feedback you get on your PRs, the better. That means people doing code reviews care enough about you as a contributor that they’re willing to spend time going over your authored PR. It gives that much more meaning to your PR when it’s eventually approved and merged. And you can say, “I’ve contributed something meaningful to this project!”

Yes. every project varies, but as long as its constructive feedback and not toxic opinions it's all good.

It can be a shock the first time your ideas/contributions are beaten up on, but you end up with the contribution being all the stronger for it, and you start to look forward to finding the groups who will really put your work on trial

​@@stevecarter8810so true, i work with someone on my team that is very strict, when i first joined i thought he was being overly nitpicky and hated adding him to reviewers list because he always had something to say, but now i gottten to know him more and got used to it . I can proudly say that thanks to his guidance, sometimes toxic but with good intentions, I have gotten a lot better with thanks to his advice and he became my favorite person on the team, it feels really good when he gives you good feedback and actually cares about what you put on

the problem is that I'm not smart enough to contribute anything meaningful to any project..

@@Danuxsy nah youre good u just gotta startt

Also, just remember to check whether the project is still active or not by checking the latest pull request date and also ask the owner before solving an issue, the issue might already be assigned to someone or for any reason they may not accept your PR so prepare for that as well just in case.

I can't agree with this enough. The sense of achievement for adding anything of value to something YOU value is amazing. I've even had my own fork become more popular than the original project, and made it the reference implementation for an IETF RFC. Aim high, and have fun. Oh, and read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" for a primer on how open source rewards contributors, and how contributors reward open source.

I've always been really intimidated to contributing to an open-source project, but i think I just need to give it a go. Just looking through other people's code will be helpful, and making some changes can help me practice more all the things that I've learned. Will have to give this a try soon!

I started my journey with open source in 2019. Gradually I made my career in open source and now working for an Open Source company. The best part is ypu get to contribute to projects freely. There are lot of talented developers and almost every open source developer is passionate about their work. ❤️

P.S - I never worked on closed source projects 😂

very cool.

How was your interview?

@@pedrotorres2747 It was awesome. The interviewers were the engineers working on the project that I was going to join. They asked me very basic DSA questions and then some computer science concepts. They talked a lot about my projects, GSoC experience. Most of the interview was a open discussion on general programming topics.

@@space_ship643 I'm glad to hear that your interview went well, and I hope to have a similar experience in my future job interviews. I have experience in JavaScript and PHP, but sometimes it's difficult to access job opportunities because they require years of experience or even a bachelor's degree in my country. That's why I'm focusing on improving my English skills so I can work in another country that offers more opportunities. Do you have any recommendations for me?

I still think its very hard to find projects suitable for beginners. Most will have an immense codebase with various technologies a beginner haven't used etc. Most bugs need a very good overlook of the project in order to understand and solve it.

If you're a beginner then the ideal situation is for multiple beginners to have some way of finding each other and working together on simple projects.

Exactly. I am just trying to switch my career to a Java programmer. I have been doing various Java programming courses for the past few months and this is the first time I hear about this. And at first sight it looks very scary. As a total beginner I don't feel like I could contribute at all. I'd most likely make even more bugs than fixing them.

Yes I mean I pushed for certain interface features during development on Blender's Grease Pencil. And I saw it through. I insisted that they should sync up the toggle options for onion skins and layer visibility in the timeline section and the tool section. And whaddya know, they decided to include that. 🙌😄 If you ever have an idea that can help make an open source project better, it's best to speak up about it and keep pushing for it to happen.

Did you code it? Or just demand repeatedly that someone else do it?

It’s a wonderful feeling to find a bug in a piece of software you use and to submit a pr resolving that bug!

absolutely!

I wonder when AI will be able to fix the issues automatically, later this year?

@@Danuxsy soon but not that soon

@@Danuxsy I already ue ChatGPT to debug code. It not only fixes it, but more importantly it explains the fix.

I'm a hobby programmer and I'm really interested in contributing to open source, but I'm very intimidated. This was super encouraging. Thank you!

You could also maybe in the future talk about issue tags and good first issues. You can actually use advance search to filter these and then I feel contributing becomes much easier. Good stuff tho!

Great idea! Appreciate it.

Note that contribution guidelines are sometimes not in the README file (called CONTRIBUTIONS, contrib, or something similar)

good point! thanks!

Great video! Perfectly short and digestible. As somebody who's been wanting to get into contributing to open source, this video was extremely helpful!

Glad you liked it!

Great advice! Can’t believe I never thought to look at the dependencies of a project to find other projects to contribute to. Love that suggestion!

Glad it was helpful!

Like 1:20? I still don’t understand how you find other projects by only looking at dependency of one project

This is really great and something I didn't know you could do. I will have to look into this a lot more as I think the experience and feedback is something you are unlikely to get elsewhere.

Glad it was helpful!

that was a straight to the point, very informative and cool to watch video. Great stuff man. I just started on the computer science carreer and this was 3min of solid help in my path

What's most wild to me is how often people run into an issue or hurdle when installing some software then don't just go in and add their steps to resolve into the projects documentation. If I ever have an issue with documentation and I find the answer and it isn't in the documentation already, I open a PR with those changes added.

AMAZING video. Loved it. But I have a request: please create a longer version of this video explaining each step of the process in a bit more detail.

Great suggestion!

This is so far the most clear-cut explanation and also has motivated me to contribute more! Thank you so much for the video !!

Glad it was helpful!

My first contribution was not too long ago to inquirer js library. I was fixing uncaught errors throw in in some case of menu scrolling. After tracking down all the calls I found just one line where the problem was. My change was accepted and pushed to npm. As a result I felt myself a hero of some meme who crashes people's prod servers with just one line change, because that's what I did by using es2020 operator "??"😅 Bunch of ppl with node 12 and lower were complaining, even dependencies freeze quick patch was rolled. 😵‍💫 Luckily I managed to replace it with polyfil before too much damage been made. 😊 This kind of experience was new to me, scared and excited at the same time 🙃

it can be difficult to put yourself out there but its also rewarding to see your stuff get merged.

Submitting tickets, well written, researched and with reproduction steps, can also be really helpful to maintainers or to yourself. I have first hand experience at finding bugs or missing features in a framework I use at work, write professional tickets (what's the issue, severity, why it's an issue, expected behavior, tracing the origin of the issue in the source code if possible, providing code/pseudo code when a PR isn't an option) and get notification of a patch within a week on totally open source projects. That's also a good skill to have and you can use it at interviews if you can show multiple tickets and their resolution time compared to other tickets or average closing time in a project.

very true. A well written, detailed issue report goes a long way. There's nothing worse than "this thing doesn't work" with no additional details!

love this video because 1. On point 2. Time saver 3. Insightful

thank you!

Wow...this was both concise yet extremely informative. Thank you!

An amazing video. So much information condensed into such a small sized video. Absolutely love it!

Thank you!

Probably the best, most straightforward video out here on contributing to open source projects. Thank you so much sir.

Thanks!

This is great, I’ve always wanted to contribute to an open-source project but it always seemed so intimidating.

thanks! no need to feel intimidated. find something you like with some like-minded individuals and it will be fun.

Thank you! I know the video is slightly old, but I’m job hunting for full-stack junior dev roles right now and this video succinctly explains to me how I can improve my job hunt by showing how to easily contribute to open-source projects. Now I just have to find something to work on and hopefully not break anything 😂😂

Lol. That second part is always the challenge

Helping more people become comfortable with open source and contributing in such a clear concise video is fantastic, well done. Telling people "github is the new resume" is utter nonsense!

thanks for the comment. Its too late now, but i think if i could do it again i would soften that statement. github is like a portfolio, not necessarily the new resume.

Thank you so much for this post! I’ve always wondered how to contribute, I love how concise and straight to the point it is!

you're welcome!

Thank you so much for this. I have never seen the complete process being explained so clearly like this.

Glad it was helpful!

Thanks a lot for the video, very simple yet very well explained.

Glad you liked it!

If you need actual coding experience or you're applying for a very specific company that puts a lot of value on open source then sure use this as a way to improve your resume. Otherwise it's just for the fun/community aspect, my experience is pretty limited but from both my own and others I know, OS contribution has very little value if they'll hire you or not. Though it does help you land interviews

Yes this is true. It’s good to show your capability.

*Thank you* so much for this. GitHub has always been really confusing for me to use and navigate, so having clear, to-the-point instructions or standards here have been really helpful.

ZOMG THANK YOU. So simple and exactly what I've needed forever. I've been terrified to get started because I needed to see something like this first!

Glad I could help!

Great video. Straight to the point and easy to follow

I recently had someone submit a pull request to my project and I integrated their changes. But, I have never submitted my own pull requests before, so should try it I think. Also, I have recently found features that I could suggest to a project that I am a fan of and issues. Good topic for a video!

give it a shot. its fun.

Thanks for this video! I've been using Git Hub for a few years now to manage personal projects, but I've never understood how to work on other, open source projects. I've heard about forks and pull requests, but never understood exactly how they worked. So much info in a ~3 min video!

Glad it was helpful!

I’ve actually been planning to, after college finals, start contributing to OpenHMD, specifically SteamVR-OpenHMD, to get Rift S properly supported so I can use mine without meta spyware. I imagine that’s a great project to have on a resume AND its useful. Idk how yet, to be honest. Not sure how the code works, I’m sure its kinda insane. But I’ve always learned to code by challenging myself to things well beyond my ability and pushing to understand it. Its a good strategy, and a lot of the time the actual devs for a project are willing to give advice or a few pointers if you’re willing to really learn on your own and do good work.

Nice. Sounds like fun and something you are into. I agree that taking on something out of your comfort zone is a great way to learn, especially if you are motivated for personal reasons.

Short, instructive, engaging, and straight to the point. Nice!

Straightforward. Thank you for making my first contribution painless.

This is fantastic. I always thought forks were there for you to take over a project if it died or needed to change hands. So glad this isn't the case!

They can be used for that as well, but yeah it’s good that it’s not the original intended purpose

Forking, pull requests, and other things to pull, change, and send changes to the base project might be more explanatory. Thanks, I like this content.

this video changed my mind about open source projects, i never knew that it was so easy to contribute, thanks dude!

Glad I could help!

Let's be honest. It's easy to submit contributions. It's not always easy to contribute. As he said in the video, be prepared for the worst and do not attach too much feelings to your contributions.

I think the recommendation is to have at least a basic understanding of your chosen programming language

I recently decided i wanted to learn coding by my self, been messing with C# for a couple of years learned some things. But now i feel like its sometimes i really want since learning has always been hard for me but with the C# stuff i was messaging with I realised how I actually liked searching up small things (ex: simple login form) and learning it so now the actual question: What are the most important things to start really learning software development?

I think it depends on your goals. What are you trying to accomplish with your knowledge?

You are just great Sir. Thanks a lot. I knew some git but wanted a series of commands or flow of like how we do contribution. You are great sir thanks a ton. 🙏🙏

Very cool. I think one of the best things is contributing to the community. Youtube, blogging, sharing code, or contributing to other projects is a great way to demonstrate your skills.

Leaving the good content of this video aside, I like the intention behind this video - we need more people (or may I say leaders) like him

This video alone shows that this dude knows how to do useful contributions in general.

I believe your channel will be big in the future! nice work! keep it up man!

Thank you!

First step is the harderst, totally true. To me the hard point is find a project where collaborate. I have the feeling most of them are very big to me right now.

if you have your own projects, its a good place to start. look at all the stuff you use and see if any of them would be better with new features.

Dude taught us all THAT in 3 minutes. Thank you so much.

As an open-source project that relies on help from everyone, thank you for this video :)

Since every contribution you make to the open source projects helps training of large language models, your future is certainly affected by your contribution to this community.

Yes AI will eventually own us all. Kind of tired of the scaremongering.

I try to make bug reports instead of providing the actual solution, to keep the (minor) contributor count low so that license-wise there are no problem if someone decides to change it (I seriously had people hit me up if changing the license was ok, because I added one DLL the repository). And I seriously had one dude complaining about my bug report, that I wasn't fixing it myself and that I suck for being a security researcher who just posts bug reports on open-source projects so that they can use the unfixed bugs in their reports to say open-source sucks (of which none is true). I legitimately just had a wrong free bug when running the code "casually". I provided reproducible steps, test files, everything. In the end I fixed it in the same manner as the rest of the code has been fixed at a similar line of code, created a pull request and it still hasn't been merged. (~6 hours wasted, plus a giant "f u" in my face) Another time, I added a feature I wanted, created a pull request and basically got a "won't merge", because it simply doesn't fit the idea of the maintainer of what the project should look like. (Neither would there have been any grounds to make this feature fit, because it's nature was just not fitting) Other times I create a pull request with the message: "Please test before merging" and it gets merged so fast that it can't possibly have run through any tests. Other times it takes 2 years before my pull request gets accepted, despite it literally being just a fix where someone accidentally had swapped x and y (or rather u and v). And now to the worst offender, which is my professor at uni, wants me to rebase my 60+ commits (among which are also commits of colleagues) into 4 big commits that are actually features that rely on each other, rewrite history that way and screw up authorship of files and cause me a bunch of headaches and increased testing efforts when I'm already 1 year due to submission. Not just that but it eliminates the detailed description of each commit and thereby I need to change a bunch of files again and reconsider which stuff I put into the documentation and which not, while before it was very clear that certain bugs that have been fixed did not need inclusion in the documentation, but had a detailed explanation in source control. THAT'S my experience with open-source.

Im sorry to hear that you've had a poor experience. Sometimes contributing is harder than it really should be. I know there are some toxic environments out there and some projects that just dont appreciate contributors. but... There are also some great open source communities that openly welcome contributions of any type, especially security research.

This is why I have a hard time taking the plunge into contributing, I've heard some many negative things about the open source community

Is your prof high or something? If your commits are atomic with good messages, don't rewrite history (which is already bad practice in 99% of all cases) eliminating that beautiful, self-describing and maintainable git log.

Love it! Thanks for this info. Will be certainly working on open source projects a lot more now. Liked and subscribed.

Thanks for the sub!

I don't think it's changed my life too much, it's just mostly i can benefit from less bugs in my favorite RTS game at this time because i'm doing bug reports for it (according feedback from devs good one).

Sounds pretty life changing to me, but your mileage may vary I suppose

Great video! I have some free time this summer in-between school years, so I'm excited to work on some open-source projects!

but also take some time to get away from the screen. you're eyes will thank you later.

Straight to the point! Loved it!

I just subscribed based on how effective this video was, keep up the good work.

Welcome aboard!

Wow, finally a simple explanation for how to contribute to open source

Appreciate the comment!

Hi, thanks for the intro. I am totally new to Open Source, I like to contribute some modern c++ work, this is mostly to enhance my modern c++ as well and be part of a c++ community, prefer embedded level application. Can you suggest some OS projects to get started on? I have vm/ubuntu setup . Thanks.

sorry im not going to be much help in this space. Anyone else here have some advice for Anton?

Thank you so much . I'm a totally beginner and I was thinking about writing some personal project in order to level up my resume and github . but this is a good idea . I found my new place to play . Thanks

Glad it was helpful!

Unique content, no flashy middle school effects. Loved ur content. Subscribed. We really need this kind of content creators rather than some b*ls#t creators with no degree, no information and no qualifications.

I've been looking for someone to follow in their Cloud Developer journey. Thank you for taking time to make this, liked and sub'ed!

Awesome, thank you!

Great content! I am currently looking for a job so it might be the right time to give this a go.

I was so happy to contribute to Mantine React UI library. It feels amazing to see my profile on the contributor list and know that it will impact thousands of people :)

It is a good feeling. especially for larger projects that are used by many.

One of my favorite videos on the internet. So short yet so valuable.

:)

Sometimes you don't even need to fork or code a single line to contribute! I have opened several issues that has been resolved, by code, by other people. Sometimes just raising awareness helps!

absolutely

This looks great, I didn't know it's that easy, however I'd still like to ask for advice. I don't consider myself as a good programmer, I know Python fairly well, and I'm learning C right, but I don't feel confident showing others my code. I feel like every piece of code I've written is lacking many things I'm unaware of, so my first thought while watching this video was "it looks cool but I don't want to spam projects with bad pull requests". Do you have any advice how to get past this fear? I'd love to work with others on something meaningful and something that I actually like and enjoy, but this anxiety seems to be a constant throughout my programming journey

That's normal. Thing is, you shouldn't live based on fear. All code sucks in some way. If it works, don't be afraid to ask for the PR. If it's not accepted, you'll learn why, and will do better next time. That's how one evolves, by stepping out of the comfort zone. Best of luck, don't live in fear.

@@ThePiones I think what I'm afraid of most is being told that my code is the worst thing they've ever seen, but I guess I really should put myself out there. I'll try my best, thanks for the words of encouragement

Is sounds to me like you know quite a bit. Self doubt and imposter syndrome is quite common with devs for some reason. You'd be surprised how many people are in the same boat as you. nobody is perfect and that best advice i have is to just give it a shot.

@@AskCloudTech Last night I gave some open source projects a look, it kinda feels overwhelming at first, I should probably find smaller projects as well as projects that I feel passionate about. I'd like to thank you for this video, I always thought that helping a project is much more complicated than that. I'll give it my best shot, thanks again

@@shortervideos Try making some documentation contributions with up for grabs labels or something, that's how I started out. I assure you your code is not the worst thing people have seen. Even if it is, who cares? Move on and get better, who cares what people on the internet (or even real life, but that's harder) think or say. It's 50 50 whether someone on the internet is a bot anyway. I'm probably one

It is definitely something that's nice and fun to do. But finding projects I know enough about to actually contribute to is difficult.

At first it can be that way. My first contribution were related to additional features i personally wanted in a project. I would ask to see if the maintainers were interested then create the feature.

Thanks for making such a concise video, very valuable.

love the video. I'm just confused on one thing. What's the point of forking the project? Isn't it possible to clone the project and then create a branch for what you're tryign to resolve?

The issue with cloning is permissions. You probably won’t have permission to push your branch to the project. Thanks for the question.

Thanks so much! Wish more videos were this useful and to the point!

Glad you like it!

You earned a sub. It is nice to contribute to those repos, and also you can learn while coding on them.👀

Thanks for the sub!

Very to the point video.. No waste of a second.. 👍

Glad you liked it

I love this video. Thank you. I've been contributing for a while, when I can, or I find a bug.

Great! thank you, quite concise but informative.

Glad it was helpful!

Oh yeah, getting into Linux and fixing small bugs and annoyances in the programs I used, or even just reporting them, that's how I got started.

It’s a great way to learn!

Wow, a good YouTube video! These are few and far between, especially nowadays. Thank you for the tips!

you're welcome!

Thank you so much for sharing such powerful info which can help us to develop our GitHub profiles

I love how you went straight to point!

thanks! time is precious!

best guide I've found on this topic, thanks! All thriller, no filler!

Wow, thanks!

Hands down the best advice on this topic I’ve run across.

This sounds romantic but the truth of the matter is: It's extremely difficult to find a repository to commit to. The explore page shows you repos across all languages, if you nail down a single language the most starred repos are usually pretty quick to fix trivial bugs while the much more complex ones are left open. The less stars a repo has the worse, when you find a repo with an issue you could tackle you already see an open pull request from 4 months ago. As a new developer this can be a really frustrating experience.

I never really considered this when I was younger. I always felt it was quicker for me to do something myself rather than explain and look over someone else's work, so I figured that would be the same here. I wouldn't want them to spend more time reviewing and explaining stuff to me than just having someone who knows what they're doing do it from the start.

I think sometimes it is, but when a project gets large enough there are ideas that come from the community

I seriously made a habit of finding bugs and fixing it on git. This really helped me building up my portfolio. Hiring manager really loved it.

As a 3 month in dev I appreciate a lot this tip. Thx

glad you like it!

I've been involved in externships working with various companies on their open source projects. I'd really like to start contributing again but I'm having a bit of trouble. 1) I previously had engineers from that company help explain the codebase and give me a rough idea on where to start with a PR. I'm confident I could figure out the issue with some basic knowledge. However, I'm having a lot of difficulty navigating new large/complex codebases. For example, how would you even begin solving issues on codebases like React? 2) I'm not actually sure what issues are issues. Some seem to be user error, other codebases I use have a problem where easy fixes are done immediately by the senior engineers so there are never any good first issues or they're issues from years ago that likely aren't relevant anymore. Would love your 2 cents!

Good questions. These are common issues. Often times open source issues queues are somewhat unmaintained because the owners of the project don’t have time to manage them. One way you can get involved is to help with managing issue queues and clean up old issues. I think if you are looking to contribute code the best place to start is with a project you use. Since you use the project, you know the issues and might understand the code better. This means that you can make contributions that improve the product for yourself and others. Otherwise, sometimes it’s just a matter of asking in the issue queue if something still needs to be done, or even asking for a place to start. Many project owners know how to resolve an issue but just don’t have time. They might even show you where to start in the code to resolve a problem.

@@AskCloudTech Thanks so much for your answer. I actually found an issue on a geospatial library I use. Maintainer answered a lot of questions but didn't have time to code it up as you stated.

This video is golden . Thanks for sharing and keep it up please !!

Thank you! Will do!

I tried. And here's the thing. I submit the pull requests, the other developers copy the change, generate their own pull request and approve their own pull request rather than approving mine. It's kind of fool's gold.

Man, that's a bummer. I've personally not encountered this.

You left out one of the most important steps -- discussing the change you'd like to commit before working on it. I've had plenty of pull requests go ignored because maintainers just didn't care about the feature

True. Thanks for the contribution!

Excellent video, thank you! I definitely find it hard to just start.

You’re welcome! Starting is always the hardest part. Just fail fast and you’ll feel better

Great video!!! Straight to business!!

Thanks! as someone trying to land a programming gig, I appreciate this idea-

You bet!

Love this straight to the point clean without water

Amazing. I have created a meetup "Together, we OpenSource". My goal is to help underprivileged and underrerpresented groups of people to find their path in IT world. I hope you do not mind if I share your video? BTW, the group is fully remote and free to join.

Love this!