About Open Source Projects and How to Approach Them.
Hey guys! Welcome to my first ever blog post. I have always had a habit to write about different things that I keep learning, but mostly i keep them to myself on my evernote notebooks and what not. Now, I want to try something new and write a neat and proper Blog about anything that i learn from the time i invest in my work. I think that will make me feel a lot more motivated and persistent.
Alright with that out of the way, let's go over the topic:
In the recent years accessibility has reached new heights.
Around 10 years ago not every individual had access to GitHub. Most people worked individually on their personal projects while banging their heads on the table and doing work mostly on their own, unlike now when almost everyone has access to GitHub, but yeah people still bang their heads on the table.
Well, you NEED to have a GitHub profile in this day and age of software. So might as well leverage it the best way possible.
Interviewers look at your GitHub profiles as a reference for your experiences with different projects and also your contributions to open source projects can become a good factor.
What are Open Source Projects exactly?
When a project is open source, that means anybody is free to use, study, modify and distribute to our project for any purpose.
When it says anybody, it literally means ANYBODY.
- The open source license guarantees that. And it is a must to have it when we launch an open source project.
- Along with that the project should have a proper readme file detailing the contribution guidelines as well as the different parameters and tools that the project entails.
- And like anything and everything, comes the CODE OF CONDUCT!! read it. Don't violate it.
Why Open Source is powerful for your skill development?
Once you get into open source you realize the beauty of this approach in terms of breaking the barriers for collaborations. This allows people to spread and improve the quality of their projects with reliable code from developers all over the site.
Photo by And so this leads to the formation of teams of contributors working from all over the globe.
When you contribute your code to any OS ( Open Source ) project on GitHub the person or the team maintaining that project repository go through your contribution and review it and comments about all the different ways that you can improve the work that you have already done. Over time this goes a long way when you start development projects of your own. Below is a quick and simple interaction to show the same.
So WHY even do out source your work for free?
There are several reasons why a company or even individual would want to open source a project the person is working on :
Connecting your Original ideas with Better minds : In case you complete an interesting project that seems to be somewhat original and a less known topic, you can upload ( push ) it to GitHub and promote it to people more experienced than you on the tools used on that project. While this keeps the project yours, it helps improve it from a huge developer community that can boost it's quality to new heights if you can connect with the right people.
Transparency to Bugs: The projects you upload can be inspected by anyone for errors and efficiency tweaks. And this not only applies to projects, but anything you might be working on at the moment.
How can you CONTRIBUTE and where to start?
Photo by I'll be strictly keeping this for first-timers cause I would like to think of myself as a first-timer as well.
I would have liked to level down a whole list and describe each OS projects myself but it would be a lot better if first-timers just use the first-timers-only labelled open issues on github.
You can also check out some amazing repositories like MunGell/awesome-for-beginners to get a much more detailed insight. They have categorized the different projects based on the different tools required for its development so it is the absolute perfect place to start. Comment down other resources if you know any.
Can you make your own Open Source Project ?
Well obviously. Anyone can. It may not even have to be one about a technical software development project. Can just be something about books or tutorials or cheat sheets. Whatever it is, it is a good opportunity to show your work to people with like minded goals which can be scary but beneficial. Be it a game that you really care about putting out, or an app that just is your imagination. Do whatever you want and be clear with your WHYS. That's the most important part. Don't be swayed away by the culture either.
Conclusion :
Well that is it. I have recently started on Open Source Projects myself and felt like it'd be good to give out what i have learnt from different parts of the community. I have been following Hashnode for a few months now and putting out this post feels great! Anyway signing off. Your ideas on the comments below.
