It's funny. It really took me committing something to some open project to realize that all those programmers out there are actually all people like me.<p>When I first committed something to an OSS project, I got an amazing response full of gratitude and warmth. For me, this took a lot of anxiety out of the whole experience! Since then, I have contributed several small things to several projects. That is the way it should be!<p>Funny enough, my first commit to an OSS project felt very similar to my first post to a message board, my first post to a foreign message board, my first post to Hacker News, hell, in some ways even to all those first awkward sentences you exchange with any human being!<p>Which just proves that the Internet as a whole is actually just a bunch of people. And most of the active contributors are really nice, too!
One of the most rewarding ways I've found to contribute to open source is to connect communities and developers. Like if someone posts a fork on github, put the original developer in contact with them and make sure there's an effort to collaborate rather than differentiate.<p>It seems trivial and obvious, but for the dozens of times that I've been able to make a connection it really seems to pay off. As other commenters have noted, it isn't until you're developing that you realize that other developers are just like you - the same goes with assumptions of the original project creators. "He works at Facebook, he'd never respond to me" or "She is from Germany, surely there's a language barrier", etc. are all excuses that cause forking.<p>As we all know, it is easier to download the source, fix your bug, and not submit a bugfix - as open source projects continue to increase exponentially, I think we'll see more of the successful projects being the ones that have people actively creating & seeking collaboration rather than assuming it will occur in the wild.
Thanks for your article. I've been trying to jump into contributing to OSS projects for some times but I've been unable to figure out where to start. "Scratch your own itch" is probably the best way to start for someone like me.
I run an open source programming group that meets once a month in my area and also self-assembles a few times a year at programming conferences I attend. The idea is that we meet for a few hours on Friday night and the meeting is over when there is at least one patch to a project. It's fun and I've made some friends, but there is nothing as rewarding as taking a first-timer and leading them through the process of build/fix/send-patch. It a trivial process as long as someone is in the room to help you through it.<p>There are a lot of groups like this around the world. Search for "bug mash", "hackerspace", or "hackergarten" in your area. I highly recommend attending something like this. (And if you're in the Basel or Baden-Württemberg area then come out to my group. I'm grilling American hamburgers for everyone tomorrow night).
I believe that most open-source developers started by scratching one of their itches. Probably quite a few, too, by just open-sourcing academic work.<p>Now, I wonder: how many coders did start by being ordered by their boss to open-source their code and/or to contribute to an existing open-source project?
My own first experience in trying to contribute where far from that pleasant and successful.<p>This was some years ago; I was working on one of those (back then) much beloved projects of integrating Linux file servers into an existing Active Directory domain.<p>This works pretty neat and well with samba, kerberos and samba's "winbind" daemon. Now, that winbind daemon can store its users/user-mappings on an LDAP server thus several Linux file servers would share a common user database. Typically this was done by setting up or using a separate OpenLDAP but with a few tricks, one could actually use the Active Directory itself to store all that along-side the user and not have the hassle of having to set up yet another directory server or tree.<p>I tried contacting the samba team but never really got a reply other than "they will look at it" and after months of not hearing from them, I asked again and that was it; haven't heard from them since.