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I also like contributing specifically to my field. As a PhD student and possibly future scientist, I have a vested interest in the quality of the software in my field–specifically, structural bioinformatics. I use several tools in this field and often find areas that can be improved, both for myself and others. As an example, consider this minor documentation change I added to the Biopython documentation.
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One personal example, doing this PR adding support for some operators to the autowrap project gave me the chance to learn a lot about Cython and work with a small bit of C++. Another example from the Biopython ecosystem is this PR updating the documentation-deployment process. This work was one of my first exposures to working with CI/CD systems, a topic I feel I excel in now. Being able to deliver this feature on a project that impacts many people was a very valuable and fun learning experience.
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As an example, when I first learned Python, someone suggested that I start contributing to Django. Django is a web development framework for Python and it’s incredibly popular, but it was way over my head at the time as I had just finished an introductory level book on Python development and had absolutely no experience. I didn’t even know how to use Django, let alone contribute to it. My inability to even figure out how to get Django running locally put me off OSS development for a long time. My point here is, don’t just browse GitHub and start trying to make sense of the most popular project written in your language of choice, find a project that really interests you.
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Caring about a project requires one of two things: investment in the problem being solved by the project, or an interest in the work itself. To illustrate the first point, consider Biopython. Most of the contributors to that project are bioinformatics researchers. For the second point, consider the fact that many contributors to open source programming languages (like CPython, Rust, and more) are language enthusiasts that contribute because they like the kinds of challenges language design presents.
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Caring about a project requires one of two things: investment in the problem being solved by the project, or an interest in the work itself. To illustrate the first point, consider Biopython. Most of the contributors to that project are bioinformatics researchers. For the second point, consider the fact that many contributors to open source programming languages (like CPython, Rust, and more) are language enthusiasts that contribute because they like the kinds of challenges language design presents.
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The kinds of things you want to look out for is how the community prefers to receive pull requests. For some, maintainers want all pull requests to be associated with a corresponding GitHub issue. For example, this pull request to the OBOFoundry home page removes a page from their website, but I only made this PR because one of the maintainers created issue 2590 in the “Issues” tab asking for that page to be removed.
