This article is for anyone who wants to contribute to open source and is looking out for open source projects to contribute to. Let's discuss things to consider when choosing open-source projects.
Open source contribution is one of the ways to grow a career in tech. In other ways it is also one of the few ways of getting into tech. It has tolerance for beginners. Open source projects are community-driven. Transparency and collaboration are the core features of every open source project. While looking to contribute to a project,the following tips that will help you to make the right decisions
Find a project that aligns with your skillset
There are many open source projects. They all have different purposes. They are built with many different programming languages. Choosing a project that aligns with your skillset is crucial to your impact on the project. It can be a project requiring technical skills like design and coding or non-technical skills like marketing, event planning, and community management.
Understand the project
A basic understanding of the project helps you know how to help the project. There are many ways to understand a project, and they include
Reading the documentation
Reading the README.md file
Joining the community
Going through the Contributing.md
Going through the Code of Conduct
Choose an active project
Some open source projects are no longer active. The projects might be in use, but they not actively maintained. Mainteainers of such projects do not attend to pull requests and issues on time. Contributing to such projects might make you lose your vigour to contribute to open source. Choose projects where the maintainers are active and the community is engaging.
As a bonus to find open source projects check the explore page on GitHub
This is not a complete list of all the things to consider while choosing, but it is a part of it. Let us know in the comment section other things to consider when choosing an open source project. If you contribute to awesome projects, drop them below so we can join them.
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