Hey👋 Everyone, welcome to this blog you will get to know what is Open Source and why you should know about it. Hope you have already read my last blog on Git version control and GitHub because that is a very important part of Open Source.

What is Open Source?

Before learning how to contribute to open source it's important to know what open source projects(software) are. To put it simply, open source software(or project) is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance. It's not just the source code that you can play with, you can also contribute to the documentation of the project, the assets like images, illustrations, and videos used in the project. So you can just pick an open source project look through its assets, find a bug and create a new issue about it or start working on an existing issue.

Why Contribute to Open Source?

Working on an open source project has many benefits👇

10x Learning: You'll get to learn a lot. Exposure: The open source community is super welcoming and you'll get to network with awesome like-minded people. Real World Experience: If you are a student or someone who hasn't worked on any real-life project then this is a great way to get experience working on a real-life professional project that might be used by hundreds or thousands or even millions of people.

How to find an open-source project?

This is a very crucial step. The first step is finding a project. Just typing label: beginner, label: easy, label: starter, or label:first-timers-only into the search bar on GitHub will bring up issues that the project's developers consider appropriate for beginner programmers. Once you've found a project you like, it's time to dive into your new life as an open-source developer. Within those projects, whenever you catch yourself thinking that something could be better or altered, act on your instinct.

And Make sure, your selected project will follow these things :

• The project must have a license

• It should be a recent project which means mentors and admin are active

• Make sure, people are contributing to that project

• There should be an active discussion on the project issue

• Check that mentors are reviewing pull requests of the participants

If all the above conditions are satisfied by the project then you should go for that project. Happy learning!!

Contributing to open source project

Step 1️⃣: Select a project

Search for the projects as per your linking or that you want to contribute. The best way for any beginner is to find the good first issue . There is a website that filters the good first issue based on the programming language. So to this website and find your first issue.

Step 2️⃣: Give Time to understand the project or the issue

For me, it's still hard to understand a big project with so big code base and when you are starting as a beginner will get to a point where you will like to give up but don't do that stick to it. it will take time give it at least a week or two then you will understand what is going on.

Even if you don't understand then go the close issue that is already being solved go there and understand how an issue is being solved you can ask the project maintainer to help you to contribute.

Step 3️⃣: fork the repository and Clone it.

Now you can fork the project into your account and then clone it in your local system so that you can make the required change in the project and you can test it locally without breaking the original project and causing any problems.

Step 4️⃣: Make the pull Request

Know you can Make the pull request if you solve the issue you good will get marge in the main project. This is really a big deal for every beginner it is a really great feeling.