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

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 :)

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

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

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

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!”

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.

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

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

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.

Love how you went straight to the point. Short and informative.

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 KZfaq 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

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

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.

Thanks for the quick and short video. Really helps out and doesn’t overwhelm newcomers!

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

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!

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

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

*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.

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

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. ❤️

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

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

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!

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

I love the short format of the video. Thank you.

Straightforward. Thank you for making my first contribution painless.

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

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!

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!

Love this straight to the point clean without water

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.

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

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

I would've never clicked if it wasnt that short. Great Video!!

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

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

Very good ! I found the suggested steps extremely practical to start right away. thank you !

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

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!

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.

Liked and Subbed bc it was straight to the point, keep it up!

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

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.

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 :)

I’ve searched and watched many video which only let to lots of confusion, but this was gold❤

Straight to point ...keep going bro

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.

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.

Great video. Straight to the point and easy to follow

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

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

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!

I love how you went straight to point!

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!

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 🙃

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

Best dev piece of knowledge I've got in 3 mins ever

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.

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?

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

Is it really worth the time investment? Doesnt seem like that to me tbh, its a great time sink to get to know a project enough to contribute, and then what is the reward? A cool looking github profile? I think there are a lot better ways to improve your skills or/and increase income than this

I also want to suggest a change: remove the red arrow in the thumbnail. It points to nothing meaningful and the colour is ugly, especially in the context of navy and green colours. The text, ‘This One’, can go too. I feel like forking your video is bad practice, so I won’t do it myself.

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

Short and straight to the point. I like that

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.

Prepare for the worst and hope for the best, nice one bruh, thanks, the video is amazing!

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!

And what's the benefit? a reward from god?

"Github is the new resume". No it's not. Hardly anyone looks at github projects when hiring.

Wow amazing! thank you for providing these detail explanations within 3 minutes.

Thank you so much! youtube algo is working overtime to give me exactly what i needed

Superb video. But, let me share this here knowing it can uplift someone that comes across it. Effective financial management made me rich and it is all you need if you want to build a strong financial future tomorrow. I started with 1000USD, 3 years ago I invested in a diversified stock market and fast forward to now I am worth 500000USD and am currently finishing my 8 unit apartments. I'm only 35 years old. Diversified stock investments have always proven to be very profitable, especially with the help of experts.

Straight to the point! Loved it!

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.

You are the best creator❤, this video shows how genuinely you wanted to share your knowledge, but not just make a content that makes you so special and you are amazing❤

Best video ever straight to the point Thanks for useful information❤❤

thank you for saving me time while still being efficient with information. subbed

Thanks dude. You're awesome!

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.

This was awesome. Thank you! Subscribed.

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!

short and to the point! Thanks a lot!

thats a nice fast and update to date video :)

good enough to get a kick start and that's all we need.

Thanks for making such a concise video, very valuable.

By far this is the best video

Amazing video. Thanks buddy.

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

Thanks for the brief with in a short time

Loved it, thanks!

Power-packed session.

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

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

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

I mean, I literally had no clue how this works. This video is everything that I needed. Thanks 1 million you are a lifesaver❤

Great video. Short and sweet. Thank you

quick and point. thanks !!