Open Source Contribution 101 🌱

How to get started?

Chaitanya Prakash Bapat

Published in

Technology with Chai ☕️

4 min readNov 30, 2022

Back-story ⏮

As a mentor at ADPList, I’m often asked about my open-source contributions as Apache committer and how to get started with Github.

Being appointed as an Apache Committer (apache/mxnet#19512) was one of my biggest achievements in the world of coding & technology. I wish to share the learnings from spending time with the open-source community. This prompted me to mentor early-career software professionals and computer science/engg university students. This article is an attempt to answer the question —

What would I do today in Nov 2022 if I were to start my journey in open source?

🙋🏽‍♀ What does open-source mean?

Github is the poster-child of open-source universe, having popularized the notion of repositories, pull requests & version control. Open-source is essentially about dezocratising access to the source-code. It’s about tearing down the walls pasted with non-disclosure agreements [NDAs] and restrictive copyrights & trademarks ™️. This doesn’t imply that open-source code doesn’t have licenses or copyrights. It is about providing freedom to share knowledge and information publicly with the security of proper citation and referencing. Open-source is a great leveler, in that sense. People from across the world can read, comment, write and express freely about the software being developed in the open-source world. It’s this freedom of expression, the fundamental human right, when applied to the world of software and technology, manifests in the form of “open-source”.

🙋🏼‍♂️What does open-source contribution entail?

Alright, now that we are on the same page as far as the term “open-source” is concerned. What activities are associated with OS contributions? 🧩

In my opinion, following sets of actions fall under the umbrella of OS contributions 📝

Create issues, bugs & ask questions
Raise Feature requests [through issues, jira or project tracking software]
Ideate & make Proposals
Comment and participate in discussions
Answer questions
Fix bugs
Review code developed by other members in the community
Add tests, improve the testing/CI/CD infrastructure
Write new feature code
Attend virtual/in-person events
Evangelize the library/product/service
Actively communicate in the discussion/chat channels/dev lists
Vote & participate in the release process [of library/product/framework/service]

and many other things..

🏁 How should I get started?

I’d pursue 1 of the following 2 routes

Famous project by renowned open source organizations
Projects I’ve most context on

☝🏽 Find my first project(s) to contribute

Look up familiar projects supported by famous Open Source Organizations

Famous Open Source Orgs — GNOME, PSF, ASF, DF, LF

Apache Software Foundations — hadoop, hive, hbase, mxnet, cassandra
The Document Foundation — LibreOffice [Open office] suite
GNOME Foundation — famous GNOME desktop environment
Linux Foundation — famous for UNIX-based operating system
Mozilla Foundation — famous for browser

✌🏽Select from my high-context projects

An easy way to make meaningful impact to the developer community is when you already have some built-in mental model of the underlying product/framework/service. I’d channelize my energy in making those aforementioned open-source contributions by leveraging the knowledge & the context I’ve built thus far as a developer.

This could mean different projects for different developers, obviously based on the software stack they’re most used to.

I’ll list down common open-source projects based on languages: