This post will get you updated on how to get into open source development
Open Source Development
Open Source Development!
Open Source Development is a very good way of upskilling yourself and contributing back to the community that helped us get where we are now in the world of development.
As a disclaimer, I honestly do not do as much open source development as I should. This is very much “do what I say and not what I do”. I should be taking my own advice and doing more development for the community.
So lets get into it!
Is open source development for me?
Open source development is there if you want to:
- Get better at coding fast
- Contribute to the bleeding edge of technology
- Get a job
Open source development is not for you if:
- You are not familiar with how Git works.
- You do not know the basics of any programming language
- You are not willing to learn
That being said, let’s get onto this
The open source development flow
I’m definitely not the first to have written documents about this.
An overview of the flow is on GitHub Guides
First off, Open an issue for some feature or bug you want to talk about. Be descriptive! There are templates available for authoring issues you should use. This is optional, but is good to talk about your change before you code them.
Make sure that before you open an issue it hasn’t already been opened! There are other developers that might be thinking of the same thing as you.
Secondly, Fork your project. This gives you a local copy of the project that you can edit
Thirdly make changes to your own version. This can be either through Git or through the web interface. In the tutorial, we used the web interface, but in a real life setting I would recommend using git so that you have access to all your developer tools
Fourthly Open a pull request. This adds a pull request to the upstream repository. Your code is then reviewed and if accepted, will be merged into master.
And that’s it! You’ve contributed to the community!
Obviously, it’s not as easy as that… There is a lot to learn along the way in your programming language and git flow. But that’s part of the fun!
Hope you found that useful. Contact Sam Nolan if you have any questions.
