6 Ways How to Contribute to Open-Source (and to Tolgee)

Hacktoberfest is just around the corner and we are happy to participate this year with Tolgee too! Whether you are a coding newbie, programming guru, or not developer at all, there is always a way how to contribute.

Join us for Hacktoberfest Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open-source projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors. There are plenty of ways how to contribute to open-source (not only during Hactoberfest for sure), but for this article, we picked six of them, both code or no-code ones. If youd be interested to contribute to Tolgee, we also added some actionable tips to each of them. Purposely described shortly, to not waste your time which you can spend contributing to some awesome open-source project. Here we go!

1. Improve the knowledge base

The knowledge base is extremely important for someone new to the project: both for onboarding new users and other contributors too. You can improve the projects documentation which is crucial for every single open-source project, enhance the product tutorials, Q&As, etc.

Contributing to Tolgee tip: Anything incomprehensible in our Docs? Just suggest a change directly, we are using Docosaurus and on each page, you can click on Edit this page and then express yourself.

2. Write

Share your experience or coding insights from the open-source project of your choice in a short blog post. You dont necessarily need to have your own blog or website, you can just write a guest post for some of the hundreds of publications on sites such as FreeCodecamp, Hacker Noon, Aviyel, or OpenSourceForU. Neither you have to be a skilled writer: just sharing your personal experience in your reviews on open-source tools would be very valuable for other users.

Contributing to Tolgee tip: Write a review for Tolgee, pick up some article topic at Aviyel, or make out your own writing Tolgee-related theme. Let your imagination run wild! In cooperation with Aviyel we are participating in the Opening session where you will learn more about no-code contributions.

3. Code

Developers of all experience levels can help with contributing to the open-source project code. From fixing the bugs, testing the code to commenting on the code to make it clearer. During Hactoberfest the Hactoberfest tag in GitHub issues makes it very simple to find. Just dive in and choose the right one for you!

Contributing to Tolgee tip: If you would like to contribute to Tolgee, search our GitHub repository for issues labeled Hacktoberfest. We also have a couple of good first issues for newcomers.

4. Translate

Translating is a very valuable kind of contribution as you help to make the software accessible to a way larger user base around the world. If you are a native speaker or youre fluent in some other language, translation is an awesome way how to contribute. Naturally, not all open-source projects are prepared for localization, so you can get in touch with the maintainers of your favorite project and offer them your help.

Contributing to Tolgee tip: You can translate Tolgee tool to some new language. Now its available in English, French, German, Spanish, and Czech (and Norwegian is in the process). You can also review existing translations and comment on them to make them perfect. Just shoot us a message!

5. Actually use open-source products

Just be a great user! From the user point of view, you can e.g. improve UX or report bugs. You can find new projects on GitHub or another great place where to explore open-source software alternatives is for example Open Source Alternative To project.

Contributing to Tolgee tip: Implement Tolgee on your project to make it multilingual. Double contribution tip: kill two birds with one stone by contributing with translations to some open-source project which uses Tolgee and then share with us your experience. You can check for example following projects looking for translation contributions:

Affine
ElevenClock
Fluent Search

6. Share feedback

To move forward with any open-source project, feedback from real users is very needed. Do you have any ideas on how to improve the project? Which feature to add? Share it in project communities and discuss it with others.

Contributing to Tolgee tip: suggest new features, share your feedback in our Slack Tolgee community or on Github Discussions

Final thoughts

Of course, there are definitely more options on how to contribute to open-source out there. Whatever your motivation is, from the willingness to learn something new, improve your existing skills or just support your favorite open-source project, you have multiple options on how to do it. But the important thing is that everyone willing to contribute to open-source can actually bring their skills to the community to support it.

So enjoy Hactoberfest and dont forget that even the smallest of contributions is still more than none.

P.S. If you have any questions regarding contributing to Tolgee, feel free to email us or reach us on our social media.