Getting the Most Out of Open Source

Contributing to open source should be fun and rewarding! Whether you are a beginner or seasoned open source enthusiast, you’ll come away from this talk refreshed and ready to contribute to or maintain an open source project.

What You’ll Learn

• How to have happy, productive, and meaningful interactions with the open source community.
• How to craft a great issue and PR (pull request).

This Talk is Designed For

• Open source contributors and maintainers of all levels.

• Slides from this talk

GitHub guides

• Configuring issue templates for your repository
• Creating a pull request template for your repository
• Setting guidelines for repository contributors
• Introducing draft pull requests

Further Reading

• How to Harness Radical Candor in Code Reviews by The DEV Team
• Your First Open Source Contribution, (pdf) from Emily Giurleo’s Codeland 2020 workshop
• GitHub Tips & Tricks, by Joe Previte
• What Open Source Project Should I Contribute to?, by Kent C. Dodds
• How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub, by Kent C. Dodds
• Git: Cheat Sheet (advanced), by Maxence Poutord
• Learn Git Concepts, Not Commands, by Nico Riedmann
• Any Contribution to Open Source is Valuable by Nick Taylor
• Projects With Great Documentation by Nick Taylor
• conventional: comments by Paul Slaughter
• Learn In Public, by Shawn Wang (@swyx)
• husky: an npm package by typicode
• lint-staged: an npm package by okonet(Andrey Okonetchnikov)
• Your Code of Conduct by Open Source Guides

Nick Taylor is a Senior Software Developer at Forem/DEV working on all things Forem. When he’s not programming, he enjoys working out, snowboarding, and a long long time ago, rugby. He is not a big fan of spiders.