How to make your first OSS contribution
Tags: beginners, opensource
Published: 2022-10-22 05:53:53

# About this article

This article is a summary of what I did for my first OSS contribution. 👟
I hope this article to be helpful for junior engineers who want to contribute to OSS but don't know what to do.

# TL;DR

- Correcting/translating documentation
- Correcting/translating Tutorial

I believe it is a good idea to start with these areas.
There are rather many opportunities to correct minor mistakes and mistranslations in documents and tutorials that we use on a daily basis for work and study, if we are aware of them.
Why not start with a small contribution? 👍

# The path I followed

Now, I will describe what I actually did after I decided to become an OSS contributor. 😤

## 1. Understand what OSS contributions are

First, I searched for information on how to contribute to OSS.
Among several articles I read, I recommend the following article because it was comprehensive about OSS contributions.

https://opensource.guide/ja/how-to-contribute/

- What is OSS Contribute and what is good about it
- How OSS Contributions can be made
- The structure of an open project
- How to find projects to contribute to
- Checklist before contributing

## 2. Practice the OSS contribution flow

I found a repository where you can practice the flow of OSS contributions, so I did it.

https://github.com/firstcontributions/first-contributions

## 3. I joined a translation community

Mozilla Japan's community translates MDN into Japanese.
I have always been curious about it, so I joined.

https://mozilla.doorkeeper.jp/

I was a bit nervous about joining for the first time, but the onboarding materials were well-prepared and regular members helped me via Slack, so I was able to work on the translation without any problems.

By the way, here is the page I translated 😎.

https://developer.mozilla.org/ja/docs/Glossary/DSL

It's a small contribution, but it made me feel proud to be able to contribute to MDN, which I use all the time ✨

## 4. Make minor corrections to the documentation that I encounter during my daily work and study

Once I made the first OSS contribution, I felt like the hurdle of OSS contribution was somehow lowered all the more. 🚀
From there, I made minor corrections to the documentation I encountered during my daily work and study, as well as corrections to translations.

Fixing translations of Web.dev Japanese pages
https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/pull/8594

Storybook Tutorial Japanese page translation corrections
https://github.com/shippio/back-office-next/pull/103

Fixed sample code in Rollbar documentation
Fixes to the sample code in the Rollbar documentation [rollbar-oss-contribute](https://storage.googleapis.com/zenn-user-upload/8dd58c115c9b-20221022.png)

# In the future

Fixing documentation and translations is an important contribution, but I want to make technical contributions too!! 🧑🏻‍💻

When I encounter problems or improvements in the language or packages I use, I want to be proactive by raising an Issue or submitting a PR, rather than being passive. 💪

If you can't find it in your daily work, you can use the label `good-first-issue` to find issues for beginners. 🔰

https://github.com/topics/good-first-issue
https://goodfirstissues.com/
https://goodfirstissue.dev/language/javascript

Happy OSS Contribution! 🎉

The article is also available in Japanese: https://zenn.dev/takuyakikuchi/articles/a663c523823251