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OSS Contributions

What Motivates a Developer to Contribute to Open-Source Software?

  • It can be hard to imagine that many of the applications and programs we use today are built by hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people all over the world. Open-source software (OSS) is a rapidly growing industry that provides many benefits to the individuals and businesses who use it, as well as to its programmers.

The most common reasons why developers contribute to open-source software:

  1. Improve Coding Skills
  • As with almost all professionals, the only way to truly learn and perfect your craft is to practice, practice, practice.
  1. Gain Early Experience
  • Another motivation that is closely related to the first point is that OSS provides young developers with useful and valuable experience often required by companies for employment, even for internships and entry-level positions.
  1. Increase Community and Peer Recognition
  • Most people who are passionate about something strive to be recognized for the quality work they produce, and for some, developing software is a huge passion.
  1. Greater Job Prospects
  • In the same way contributing to OSS can help you increase your chances of landing an internship, it can also improve your job and career prospects.
  1. Improve Software on a User and Business Level.
  • A lot of the time, developers first come across OSS as users. In this case, the desire to contribute to this particular piece of OSS stems from wanting to improve it for their own use – either by improving certain areas or by developing new features and functionalities.

First Timers Only

Welcome! Let’s do some open source!

  • Contributing to open source for the first time can be scary and a little overwhelming. Perhaps you’re a Code Newbie or maybe you’ve been coding for a while but haven’t found a project you felt comfortable contributing to.

You can do it! Here’s how.

  • First contributions is a hands-on tutorial that walks you through contributions workflow on GitHub. When you complete the tutorial, you have made a contribution to the same project.
  • https://up-for-grabs.net is a site that aggregates (rolls up and makes easy to explore) projects that actively want help. They label those projects with things like “up-for-grabs”, “jump-in” or “help wanted.”
  • goodfirstissues.com is a site that aggregates the latest issues with the label “Good First Issue”, which is a GitHub feature for finding easy issues to tackle (see here). goodfirstissues.com empowers first-time contributors to find and select issues that they want to solve

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