Open-source software relies heavily on the community for long-term sustainability. One way to contribute to open-source projects is by making contributions to the project’s repository and performing code reviews.

Let’s say you’ve been using open-source libraries for your personal and professional projects for some time. In the spirit of open source, you’ve decided to give back by contributing to some of these libraries and frameworks.

However, you’ve never contributed before and don’t know where to start.

In this module, you’ll learn how to make meaningful contributions to open-source projects. You’ll discover the types of impactful projects and activities, and how to get familiar with a project and its community standards. You’ll learn how to effectively use Git and GitHub to improve code or documentation. You’ll also learn what to do and what to avoid when communicating with project maintainers, how to ask for help, request a review, and review others’ work on GitHub.

By the end of this module, you’ll know how to successfully submit a contribution to an open-source project on GitHub by following best practices.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• Find open-source projects and tasks to contribute to on GitHub
• Create pull requests for open-source projects
• Apply best practices for communicating with open-source maintainers and conducting code reviews
• Find and engage with open-source communities

Prerequisites

• A GitHub account
• The ability to navigate and edit files on GitHub