Getting started with open source contributions for beginners

Want to contribute to open source but don't know how to get started? Well, today I'm going to teach you how. By the end of this video, you'll know what open source is, how to find projects to work [music] on, how to read an open source repo, and much more. Hey, [music] I'm Kaniesha and I'm so excited that you're here with me today. I have my friend Angela here to show you how to dig into the world of open source and help [music] you make your first open source contribution. Thanks, Kaniesha. [music] Open source software, often abbreviated as OSS, refers to software that features freely available source code. In contrast with closed source software, open source software is publicly available for anyone to use and build upon. This means that all of the work, including the code base and communication amongst users, is available for everyone to see. If you're just getting started in the world of software development, browsing and contributing to open source projects is a great way to dip your toes into large impactful projects used by countless users worldwide. GitHub is the home for open source software. So, let me show you how you can find projects to contribute to. Contributing to an open source project [music] for the first time can feel daunting. I know it did for me. The first thing you can do to find projects to contribute to is to look for projects built in a language that you know. You can ask GitHub Copilot Chat to find open source projects written in a specific programming language that is also accepting new contributors. On GitHub, click the Copilot icon to open a new conversation. Then enter the prompt, "I'm looking for a list of open source projects written in TypeScript that are accepting new contributors." Search GitHub and narrow down the list to repositories that use the good first issue label and have over 100 stars on GitHub. Copilot returns a list of projects that you can explore filtered by the good first issue label. The good first issue label indicates that an issue is beginner-friendly and a great starting point for new contributors. This is a great way to find issues in a project that you can work on. For example, let's say you're interested in contributing to the VS Code repository and wanted to find good first issues. On GitHub, go to the VS Code repo and click issues. Then click labels and filter by good first issue. You'll see a list of open issues available for you to work on. To start working on an issue, you'll need to read the contributors guide in the project's repository. So, let's take a look at the key things to look for in an open source project. Well-maintained open source projects have a few things in common. They have a well-documented readme with installation instructions, a contributors guide that explains how to contribute, an open source license so we know the project is free to use, at least 100 GitHub stars so we know it's well used in the community, active development so we know that a maintainer of the open source software will be able to review our contributions, and a good first issue label to indicate being open to new contributors. When you're looking for a project to contribute to, these are the things you should be looking for in the repository. Let's take a look [music] at this project, Gitfolio, to see if it's a good fit. This repository seems like something I'd be interested in contributing to and it's right up my alley in terms of programming languages. It also seems to be well-documented and there is a contributing.md file that shows me how to contribute code to it. The last update to the repository was recent, so I believe it's actively maintained, too. So, let me show you how to actually make your first contribution to an open source repo. For more documentation on finding a good open source project, go to gh.io/gfiboss. Navigate to the home page of the project and click the fork button and create a new fork. A fork is a copy of a repository. We usually use forks for open source repository contributions because they allow us to freely experiment with changes without affecting the original project. I'll set the owner to be myself and keep the repository name and description the same. Great. Now we have our own copy of the repository. In the fork's repo, I'll make a quick change to the documentation, which was one of the good first issues listed in the repository. I'll make the change via the GitHub UI, but you can choose to clone the repo or use a code space. I'll make a change here and commit this change to a branch in my fork of the repository. Now I'll open a pull request to the original project using my branch with the changes. I'll click compare across forks to show my fork's changes compared to the original repository. Let's give our pull request a quick title and description and voila! Now it's ready for a maintainer to review and hopefully approve. Once approved and merged, GitHub automatically applies the changes from my fork into the main branch of the original repository, the official source of truth for the code base. Thanks so much, Angela, for coming on and showing us how to make our first open source contribution. We've covered a lot, from the definition of open source software to finding a good open source project to contributing to an open source project from a fork. I hope it inspires you to contribute to your favorite [music] projects. Check out the links in the show notes to learn more. I hope you found [music] this video helpful. Remember to subscribe to GitHub's YouTube channel so you don't miss any of our future uploads and share with a dev friend who could use [music] this knowledge. Happy coding.