I Became a React JS and Ruby on Rails Contributor—and You Can, Too
By: Fatos Morina
Tags: JavaScript, Programming, Technology, Education, Software Development

How can you contribute to famous open source projects?

Now that we’ve mentioned three major reasons why it’s worth contributing to famous open-source projects, how can you do it?

Understand how things work

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Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also helped Taylor Wilson become the 32nd person in human history to achieve nuclear fusion… at the age of 14.

Similarly, if you want to contribute to famous open-source projects, you have to understand how things work behind the scenes. You need to learn from books. You have to be curious to understand the implementations of a particular function, or how routes invoke a particular controller. That way, you may also be able to spot strange things that you can improve, or implement a more efficient method for a particular task.

The more you understand a framework, the more you tend to like using it in your projects, as we usually avoid the unknown and things that are not clear to us.

Check the reported issues

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Issues may represent bugs, concerns, or simply suggestions that other people have noticed or want to express regarding a project. They also represent a great source of contribution ideas that you can use as inspiration.

Look at the issues of a project and make an assessment of whether you can contribute to them or not.

Although some issues may seem very difficult at first, you shouldn’t be afraid to try fixing a bug or implementing a new feature in that framework. You can use it as a way to learn new things, expand your current limits, and get out of your comfort zone.

You can also ask questions for more clarity about the issues, and contribute your answers to other people’s questions.

Don’t ignore small things

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You might suppose famous open-source projects have very few opportunities left to contribute, so you may give up on the notion of contributing.

Even though that’s not the case, there are some frequently neglected responsibilities you can take when it comes to open-source projects. Aside from code, projects also need writers to help with documentation, translators to convert locale files into other languages, and designers to make interfaces more intuitive and attractive.

You don’t have to write the whole documentation or translate everything into another language. You can simply start something you believe is worth including, and also ask for help with the improvement, or simply push your minor changes and ask for feedback from project maintainers.

You can also contribute by writing tests, fixing the ones that are already failing, creating new issues about bugs, or answering questions people have asked on existing issues.

There’s also another indirect way you can contribute to open-source projects.

That’s by contacting maintainers and thanking them for their time and the work they’re doing. Most of them contribute to open source on a volunteer basis, so thanking them can make them aware of the importance of their contributions. This way, you are making them feel better about their efforts, and also inspiring them to continue with their contributions.