Guide For Your First Open Source Contribution.

Hi all. Today, I will be talking about an interesting and one of my favourite topics called "Open Source".It is a buzzword that has been roaming around developers nowadays. By following the trend, I am writing this article to help you out so that you can also contribute to open source projects easily.
So, without wasting any time, lets' get started

What is Open Source!!

Firstly, Lets' understand the meaning of Open Source. So, basically open source is a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessibleanyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.

Why you should contribute to Open Source!!

Open source is free and open to all enthusiastic folks who want to contribute to the community while learning something. Open source helps many developers to boost up their tech career. Apart from this, you will get the chance to engage with different like-minded people and share your knowledge. You will get a lot of opportunities to learn new technologies. Nowadays, open source section in the resume catches the eyes of recruiters more easily. So, open source will help you in many ways.

Prerequisites

In my opinion, there are two main prerequisites of open source contribution:-
1) Git and GitHub: You should have atleast a basic knowledge of Git and GitHub before starting to contribute to open source projects.This will definetly help you in the long run.You can find the some amazing tutorials for the same for free.Here's youtube link =>

• Hindi: Complete Git Tutorials For Beginners In Hindi.
• English: Git and GitHub for Beginners - Crash Course.

2) Your Will: Nothing is possible without your will. So, without wasting any time you should start your journey to open source and stick to it. Learning is not easy but you have to make it by staying consistent and doing hard work(Enough motivation for today)

Finding Your First Open Source Project

Finding your first open source project is a daunting process in itself. It is because there are so many projects released on GitHub and so many tutorials for finding projects to contribute. But what you need to do is just press the search button on GitHub and search for that topic in which you are comfortable and want to contribute. But the main hack that I want to share with you is to filter the projects based on the least number of stars.
Why? Because greater the number of star, bigger will be the project and complicated for the beginners. The point here is to start with the small projects and contribute. After some time, when you get the taste of open source environment, you can jump into bigger projects.

Points to ponder:

Open Source is not a competition, it's collaboration.
No working experience is required before contributing to open source.
Don't be afraid if you don't have hard core coding skills. Remember, editing a readme file is also a contribution to the project.

Useful Tips & Tricks

• Always see the activeness of the project before starting the contribution.
• Read the project's guidelines carefully before making a pr(Pull Request).
• Read the readme file to get an overview of the project before starting to contribute to a particular project.
• Join the community involved around the particular project or a topic you are interested in.
• Don't hesitate while asking any question to anyone involved in a particular project. (this is the power of open source. People are always here to help you out).
• Find an open source community to meet some like minded people and seek help from the experienced ones.
• Participate in Open Source Programs like GSOC(Google Summer Of Code) ,Digital Ocean Hacktoberfest, MLH Fellowship , GSSOC(I was part of it) and many more.

Outro

This blog post concludes that you don't need any work experience or any hard skills. Open source contribution requires your collaboration behaviour towards the project. So, turn on your laptop and find your first open source project to contribute.

So, That's it from my side. I hope you like this blog post and I didn't waste your time. If so, then please give a and share to your peers who want to jump into open source.
And if I had missed something, kindly comment down below.
See you untill next time.Connect With Me On LinkedIn and Twitter.

 "The power of open source is the power of the people.The   people rule."                          Thank You