this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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Programming
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Instead of starting your own project, have you considered simply contributing to an existing open source project instead?
Good idea!
I’m glad you agree. Honestly, as someone who has also struggled with this question, I wish I’d done this earlier, because there’s a lot of advantages to it.
It takes a lot less planning and upfront time investment before you get to see your work make a difference in the world. It’s not immediate gratification, mind you, because pull requests can sometimes sit there for days or weeks before someone has the time to review them, but when they get merged, and you get to see the feature you worked on in an app you actually use, it’s still a great feeling.
Most projects will also give you contributor credit, so your name and/or GitHub handle will show up on their repo, website, or in the app’s “about” page, and you can claim that on any job application you might submit in the future.
I honestly think it’s a great way to scratch your own itch (because you can pick what issues you want to work on and build features you’d actually want to use) while also helping other people and benefitting open source as a whole. Any reasonably popular project generally has a massive backlog of open issues, so if you’re at a loss where to even start, you can just look through there and pick something that seems doable.