There are several reasons you might want to contribute to open source software. For me, it was that I wanted to learn in a more useful way than doing programming challenges. So I looked into how I could contribute to open source projects that I use myself.
After contributing for almost two years, I notice that I have learned a lot from my contributions (which has been useful at work), as well as have made friends and have become part of a community.
In this talk I will share my experience with contributing to Cucumber, including an early mistake (merging something that wasn’t ready yet) and fixing it with the support of core maintainers, and still feeling welcome!
You’ll learn how how to find your project and contributions to start with, how to connect with the community to make sure your contributions are useful and the many different types of contributions you can make.
Contributing to open source is a way of giving back to the community. In addition, it is a way for you to learn, collaborate and become part of a community. Getting (constructive) feedback on a pull request and collaborating to make things even better is a great feeling!
Related
- Contributing to open source software: Creating a pull request (video)
- Open Source Panel @ Spring I/O 2023 (video)
- Once A Maintainer: Marit van Dijk (interview)
- Collaborating on open source (blog)
- A quest: contribute to open source communities – Lisa Crispin (blog)
- How to Start Contributing to Open Source by Gunter Rotsaert (blog)
- IntelliJ IDEA Blog: JetBrains Technology Day for Java – How I Started Contributing to Open Source and Why You Should Too (blog)
- CukenFest London Asks: Marit van Dijk (blog)
- Cucumber Newsletter – Meet a Cucumber user: Helen Scott (blog)
- Matt Broberg quoted my tweet in his talk “A Practical Guide to Open Source Contribution” at DevOps Minneapolis 2018
- Forge Your Future with Open Source by VM (Vicky) Brasseur (book)
Presentations
Date | Event | Location | Media |
Oct 6, 2022 | Voxxed Days Cluj-Napoca | Cluj-Napoca, Romania | video slides |
Oct 6, 2020 | We are ING Tech Meetup / CONTRIBUTING.MD | Online | video slides |
July 10, 2020 | Jetbrains Technology Day For Java | Online | video slides |
Apr 24, 2020 | The Virtual Bash! | Online | video slides |
Nov 16, 2019 | JFuture.dev | Minsk, Belarus | video slides |
May 16-17, 2019 | NewCraft | Paris, France | video slides |
Apr 18-19, 2019 | SeleniumConf | Tokyo, Japan | video slides |
Apr 4, 2019 | Cukenfest | London, UK | video slides |