Ask HN: How to Start Contributing to FOSS as an Ubernoob?

3 points by syeare 3y ago ↗ HN

Basically title, but for some background: I'm a student in post-secondary education that has dabbled in programming for about a decade, but never really completed any large projects. I've made simple shell scripts, but consider that "real" development work. When I tried looking at pull requests/issues and the respective APIs of FOSS projects such as GNOME or KDE apps, the code would just completely go over my head. I would have no idea how to even start solving the problem or where/what the bug even is! It just made me feel all the much more worse because I was too broke to donate to awesome projects I use, but also too moronic to contribute bug fixes. I would appreciate any and all advice, thanks!

3 comments

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fundamental 3y ago ↗

Find a small project that you're interested in and check out the developmental discussion channels to see if there's any way you can lend a hand. Starting with trying to find complex coding tasks in large bureaucratic projects is setting yourself up for failure IMO.

For example, https://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.io/contribute.html shows a few different levels of involvement in one project I maintain. That's not me saying you should work on this project specifically though; you'll want to find projects that you're enthusiastic to learn about.

syeare 3y ago ↗

YOOOOO WTF THIS IS EXACTLY THE KINDA STUFF IM INTO I'm trying to make hardware synthesizers in the future and I looked at JUCE for making VSTs before

yuvalsteuer 3y ago ↗

Depending on what kind of person you are, a different strategy would be in order, i.e if you tend to like being thrown in the deep-end try tackling the biggest github open issue you think you can handle.

If your the type to ease into things, find good-first-issues of projects you like: <self-plug> checkout, feel free to reach out! :) https://github.com/nabaz-io/nabaz/issues/2