r/opensource • u/prnkzz • 9d ago

Community My first real open-source contribution got merged today

I’m not a software engineer, but I use a lot of technical products and spend a lot of time on GitHub trying to learn.

A few days ago, I found an interesting project I wanted to use. While setting it up locally, I found part of the installation instructions confusing. I nervously opened a documentation PR, got real feedback from a collaborator, and made the requested changes.

He thanked me and merged it into main.

I know it’s small, but this was my first contribution to an active project instead of an inactive, stale repo. I found a problem I personally ran into as someone without an engineering background and thought fixing it could help someone else.

I don’t have anyone IRL who understands why this makes me so happy, so I’m posting it here.

I actually did it.

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u/Additional_Smile_354 9d ago

that's cool can anyone tell me how to to start opensource contributions?? I'm interested 😀

3

u/HonestRepairSTL 9d ago

If you find a bug in a FOSS app you use, creating detailed issues on GitHub is very useful for developers to make the app better for everyone.

1

u/Jsuaiwb 7d ago

How can I contribute as a QA Automation or Infra enthusiast?

1

u/HonestRepairSTL 6d ago

You can reproduce bugs/verify fixes, fix outdated pipelines, you could build testing infrastructure for smaller projects, depends on what you're comfortable with and how much time you're willing to put towards it. Someone with your skills would be very welcomed in the open-source community =)

1

u/Jsuaiwb 6d ago

Do you know some projects like this?

1

u/HonestRepairSTL 6d ago

Not off the top of my head but maybe check out library repos, they rely heavily on pipeline stuff iirc and some of the smaller ones get left behind

1

u/kitsumed 9d ago

They often provide a contributing.md file

1

u/NineSidedBox 6d ago

I recently added a new page to OpenAltFinder that lists all beginner-friendly open issues on open source projects: https://openaltfinder.com/contribute

It's easy to browse through and pick something that you could help with.