Contribute to An Open Source Project (PART I)

In this blog post, we are going to explain the following three things:

• What is Open-source?
• Benefit of Open-source as a Junior Developer

What is Open Source?

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product.

Benefits of Open Source
In over a year contributing to open source project here are the lessons have learnt;

• Improves your programming skill: The fantatsic thing about contributing to open source project is that you tend to interact with other developers code. How to structure!
• Meet like-minded people and get mentors:Yeah sure, you get to met developers with like-minds, some with startup culture, some who just want to build stuff people love.

Now, how do you contribute to Open source 😏

Mainly there are three ways to contribute to open source as follows:

• Create your own open source project
• Create open source alternatives to commercial software
• Contribute to existing open source projects

Create your own open source project

You might be already working on a project and in that project, there is a piece of code which can be taken out as a separate module.

I have done lots of open source contributions. Below are the few links.

https://github.com/iamgabrielsoft/poke
https://github.com/iamgabrielsoft/peniel
https://github.com/iamgabrielsoft/Origami-Bot

Create open source alternatives to commercial software

You might be using many 3rd-party libraries which are open source in your project. If you need a feature which is not present in that library. You can fork that library, implement that feature and create a pull request against that library.

Conclusion

Making open source contributions will help you to grow up as a developer. Again, don’t let questions and code suggestions hurt your ego, be open mind and learn.

As you get more confident you’ll start to review the code of the other developers and this is also a good thing to do.

If you love this article, do well to check out the part II.