Simplest Open Source Contribution - My opensource beginning story
This article will help beginners to get involved in the open source community and help them to give the idea of starting with something very small contribution to the projects.
A journey of thousands of miles begins with a single step - sage Lao Tzu
Most beginners might think that open source contributions are the direct involvement of bug fixing in the code or feature developments. but it is not only that activity. Anything involved in your efforts towards the betterment of communities that matters the most!
Story 1:
One day, I was skimming GitHub and exploring the projects related to RTSP and found the project named “SharpRTSP” by ngraziano. While reading the project document and found a couple of misspelled words that caught my attention. Without any second thought, raised an issue and specified it clearly.
GitHub link: https://github.com/ngraziano/SharpRTSP
Now, as I want to correct the simple work, Forked the project and opened the “README.md” file. After the correction, raised a PR to the master repo and commented the same in the issue raised ticket. After a couple of days, My PR got merged into the master repo.
PR link: https://github.com/ngraziano/SharpRTSP/issues/86
Story 2:
Similar to Story 1 and also on the same day, Came across the project named “AvCpp” which is a C++ wrapper for FFmpeg. While reading about the README file and found some of the misspelled words. Hence, quickly corrected the above and merged it into the master by the project maintainer.
Similarly, raised another ticket to identify the invalid URL in their documentation.
Above stories, I did not configure the project development environments in my system. Also, did not test anything. Just identified the mistakes and corrected them.
The key lessons from the above stories
Every small initiative from the developers matters a LOT to the open-source project maintainers.
Creating/writing/updating or reviewing the document or raising the issue after verification is also a good start to the open-source contributions to the community. Also, make sure that your work meets the requirements of the project terms and guidelines.