How I create my first open-source contribution.
"One of the simplest way to show-off your competence to the world as software developer is by contributing to world class open source project"
That line stuck with me since I attended Riandy Rahman Nugraha 's webinar last week regarding open-source contribution; it gave me a clearer picture of how to actually approach it.
Alhamdulillah, my pull request just got merged into Wasp's open-saas (14.5k stars ⭐): https://github.com/wasp-lang/open-saas/pull/683
One of their maintainers even corrected my approach and showed me the cleaner way to do it. That kind of feedback is something you rarely get otherwise.
Here's how I do it:
Find a repo you actually care about - I used contrib.idnremote.com (profoundly curated by the IDNRemote.com team). Pick a project you're excited to work on and familiar with the stack.
Fork, clone, and just play around with it. Being confused at first is normal - that's how you learn. I used deepwiki.com to get a holistic view of the architecture before diving in (Replace the URL's string of github with deepwiki: https://lnkd.in/gDS2TKXh).
Pick one issue you think you can handle. Don't forget to tag on it: "Hey, I'd like to take on this issue. Is it still available?"
Create your own branch, solve the issue, open a Pull Request.
The waiting game. If no response after a few days, bump them once. If a week passes with nothing, move on to the next project.
Contributing to open-source is not easy, but definitely not impossible. Thanks a lot for IDN Remote team for showing us the way.