At Women+ in Open Source Day, I got to try my hand at making a contribution to Apache Spark. While I didn’t manage to clone and build the project within the allotted time, I did get to speak with one of the project’s key contributors, Holden Karau, and was inspired by her encouragement for all sorts of people to get involved.
Contributing to open source can be intimidating! And in the age of AI, contributors from diverse perspectives are even more important.
So for our second ever Dev Discussion, we want to know: What is your advice for getting started contributing to open source projects?
Share your advice in the comments below along with links to some of your favorite open source projects! 🖥️ 🎉👇
Top comments (14)
I'd recommend looking for smaller projects to start with. Study the codebase, start small. Choose projects that you understand the language of, have clean code, are developing well, and that you'll enjoy supporting. It's a cliche, but it's one of the main reasons for contributing code.
Great advice! Are there any smaller projects you recommend?
I don't know. I only know big, complex and ugly ones. Everyone has the opportunity to search for a project on github, so take advantage of this, although this does not guarantee the cleanliness of the code.
The real barrier isn't technical it's the gap between "I want to contribute" and "I know what to fix." The best open source projects don't just accept code; they label the entry points so new contributors know where their work actually matters.
This is SUCH A GOOD POINT and essentially speaks to the importance of community when it comes to these projects -- something that was pointed out at the event. Community can fix bad code, bad code just languishes.
You nailed the answer for me
My advice is that even contributing to documentation counts as "technical enough" and is just as important as contributing code -- so if you run into an issue while trying to follow a project's documentation, go ahead and make a pull request! Lots of people will be grateful you did ❤️
the intimidation factor is real - most people lurk for years before making their first PR. the AI angle is interesting too, there is a whole debate about whether AI-generated contributions actually help projects or just create noise. personally think the bigger shift is AI lowering the barrier to understand unfamiliar codebases, that is where contribution friction usually lives
Excellent point!
thanks! the lurking-to-contributing gap is something i keep seeing. feels like the real fix is better first-issue labeling and mentorship, not just better docs
YES to mentorship, which is another point they made at the event I attended. In fact, they listed it as one of the three pillars to getting more people to contribute.
three pillars tracks - mentorship, good first issues, and probably documentation. the event angle is underrated, nothing beats someone saying "yes you can do this" in person
The Vonage Tooling MCP server is an awesome project for folks wanting to get their toes wet in OSS!
developer.vonage.com/en/blog/contr...
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