How (not) to contribute to open source

• qwik-storefront-ui

  1 29 9.4 TypeScript

  A frontend library for Qwik that helps developers quickly build fast, accessible, and beautiful storefronts.

  

Eventually, I finally had time to start working on it. It seemed easy; Boa had already given me some tips on how to get started, so I got half the work done in a short time. But then the problems started. After going in circles for about a day, I finally gave in. I did the scariest thing of all: I once again asked for help, admitting that I had no idea what was going wrong. We tried to look at it together, but we couldn't find the problem right away. So I committed the part that I did that worked, and the next day Giorgio fixed the other half and merged my very first PR into the Qwik Storefront.

• qwik

  132 20,194 9.9 TypeScript

  Instant-loading web apps, without effort

  

That was the last straw; cumulatively, I had spent more time looking for something to do than actually doing it. But I really wanted to contribute! So a few more months went by, until one day I met an Italian open source maintainer and long-time speaker, Giorgio Boa, who by the way was a guest on our podcast Continuous Delivery, and asked him for advice, saying that I wanted to be part of the OS world. He said he was working on a small library of Qwik components and could help me if I wanted. I gladly accepted, and we found an issue that seemed pretty straightforward. A few days after our conversation, I followed the little README guide to install everything required, and...nothing worked. So, after a few bad words, a lot of doubt about my skills as an engineer, and self pep talks to overcome my shyness about asking for help, I contacted Giorgio again. Even with his help, at first we had some trouble figuring out what was going wrong, but in the end I finally had a working setup.

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io sponsored

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• Puts Debuggerer

  3,151 91 5.5 Ruby

  Ruby library for improved puts debugging, automatically displaying bonus useful information such as source line number and source code.

In the beginning, I started to ask my colleagues for tips on where to start, and they pretty unanimously said to search for issues with for beginners or help wanted tags, maybe in some of the projects I was already using at work. Well, I thought, that's easy. I got a short list of the libraries I was using and/or I was interested in and started digging into their GitHub repositories. I combed dozens of open issues, but either they had no good first issue tag, or the more accessible things got snatched lightning fast.

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