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How to start contributing to FOSS projects? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by AccurstDemon@sopuli.xyz to c/foss@beehaw.org

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Hi, I dont know if this is the right comunity to ask, please tell me otherwise. I apologize for my poor English, I'll try my best!

I'm a professional software developer with about 10 years of experience. I have only worked on closed-source enterprise projects throughout my entire career. I am not familiar with the workflow involved in FOSS projects.

Is there a guide that summarizes or documents all the information or standards you need to know to contribute to any FOSS project? This includes the standards for commit messages, tags, and how to propose a new feature or report a bug.

I understand that this may be basic information for many of you, but for me, it feels a bit overwhelming. Also, I think that I'm afraid of working on a codebase that I'm not familiar with. There is also a fear of my own code being judged online. You know, you can never escape imposter syndrome.

I appreciate any info, hopefully I'll be helping on improving some of my favourite apps in the future.

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[–] kresten@feddit.dk 5 points 1 year ago

I try to get involved with the smaller tasks first. Right now, I'm trying to help organize issues on lemmy and lemmy-ui. I mark duplicate issues, reply to ask for more info and so on.

Sometimes I also try to help translate a project.

On the software side of things, I usually just fork the project (given it's on github), and start poking around the codebase, try compiling it, maybe try to change a few things. When I'm comfortable, I'll look into the issues, sometimes they are marked as good-first-issue, and I focus on them first.

But any maintainer out there is happy to receive a pull request, so no need to worry about making an impression or being "allowed" to participate first.