How to start to contribute to open source (properly)? 🤔 Step 2
Preparing and examining the project
It’s third post in series “How to start to contribute to open source (properly)?”. Here is the previous one.
Planning and tracking system
I think it’s better to start from creating good planning and tracking system. Install pomodorro app that allows tagging and statistics to track how much time a week do you spend and what is your results.
Give yourself some reward after achieving your time goal for a week.
Project-specific examination
General knowledge
You probably imagine what do you need to recall before starting. What are the key abstractions in this projects?
If it’s a multimedia editing maybe you need to recall media formats and general encoding practices, in text editing — fundamental algorithms of text search. Be more specific if you don’t remember or not familiar with particular thing — write down.
Testing frameworks or libraries
Learn about project testing. Add followings tool’s documentations to your learning list.
And if your project a testing library itself… well… I don’t know what to do in this case.
Documentation pieces
Official Wikis and documentation are awesome. Also try to find other people reflections in social media or blog platforms about how did they started to contribute: what were their time frames and struggles. It might be helpful.
Spend at least 2 hours in the next 2 weeks reading documentation and wikis on general topics.
Communication tools.
Join slack, mailing lists, IRC and other channels and turn off notifications. It should not create distraction possibilities when you are doing other stuff and it also should not bother while writing code. I guess as a newbie you can use them only for searches and asking, not to give advises.
Afterwords
This post came out unexpectedly small… I would like to add something in case of having discussion in comments to figure out how to start to contribute to open source properly.
Next chapter will be published next week. Also next week I will share my own result of doing this kind of analysis.
