this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Free and Open Source Software

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How to start contributing to FOSS projects? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by AccurstDemon@sopuli.xyz to c/foss@beehaw.org
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Hi, I dont know if this is the right comunity to ask, please tell me otherwise. I apologize for my poor English, I'll try my best!

I'm a professional software developer with about 10 years of experience. I have only worked on closed-source enterprise projects throughout my entire career. I am not familiar with the workflow involved in FOSS projects.

Is there a guide that summarizes or documents all the information or standards you need to know to contribute to any FOSS project? This includes the standards for commit messages, tags, and how to propose a new feature or report a bug.

I understand that this may be basic information for many of you, but for me, it feels a bit overwhelming. Also, I think that I'm afraid of working on a codebase that I'm not familiar with. There is also a fear of my own code being judged online. You know, you can never escape imposter syndrome.

I appreciate any info, hopefully I'll be helping on improving some of my favourite apps in the future.

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[โ€“] ananas@sopuli.xyz 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From my own experience:

  1. Start using open source stuff.
  2. Get annoyed by lack of a feature / a bug / something
  3. Fix it, without ever intending to upstream the changes
  4. Notice somebody has made an issue about a thing you already fixed
  5. Send the patches to upstream.
  6. Repeat ad infinitum.

That's pretty much how I've ended up contributing to a plethora of different stuff.

[โ€“] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Yep. I've submitted patches to a few projects. JD GUI seems dead, there were issues regarding the same thing I fixed. Another Gradle plugin I submitted a fix for got merged pretty much right away. As quick as I would expect for people volunteering their time that is.