Hello World ,

In this blog i will discuss about, What is open source? What i think about open source or what open source means to me. then i will tell you about, How you can start contributing to open source?

What is Open Source ?

Open source is a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible to anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.

Many open source technologies that we use today Android, Firefox, VLC media player, MongoDB, Linux, Docker and Python just to name a few.

What open source means to me?

When, i talk about open source i always feel that something that is close to my heart. Because i contribute to any open source project then the feeling of giving something back to the community automatically comes my dear friend, that your code is used by thousands or millions of users & In today's world it's really important to give something back to this beautiful world and We Open Source developers always try make Github a better place. The best way to contribute to this open world start helping out other's and mentoring out the people.

Open Source & Feelings is about the intersection between software and the humanities, and how we engage with the communities we're a part of. It is about deliberative crafting of its culture into what we want it to be, about developing strategies, skills, and solutions in order work as a community.

How to start contributing to open source?

In, Order to get a kick start with your open source journey i will suggest a roadmap which you can follow can implement in your journey. I will breakdown this roadmap in following steps mention below.

Step 1 : Git and Github

Git is software for tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.

My friend Vinit Shahdeo Wrote this Amazing Quote : “If You Are A Techie, Your Home Page Should Be GitHub, Not Instagram”

GitHub, Inc. is a provider of Internet hosting for software development and version control using Git. It offers the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git, plus its own features

Be Familiar, what is Github? How to use Github & Learn Git Commands.

Resource That You Can Follow :

Blog By : Aman Kumar thisisamank.me/git-intro-hacktoberfest-2021

Video Resource : Love Babbar Video

Step 2 : Projects & Organisations

After, being familiar with Git and Github. Then, Start looking for projects based on your tech stack.

Best to find the open source projects and organisations is going through the Google summer of code website GSOC here will find so many organisations with captivating projects.

Select projects on the basis of your tech stack.

Step 3 : Understanding Project & Start Contributing!

After, finding your perfect project it is really important to understand what is the real world problem that the project is trying to solve. what actually the project is doing. play with the software try to find issues. after doing all these task scroll down you will see readme mark down file go through it properly and setup that project in your local machine.

Sometimes it's really difficult for beginners to even setup that project in their local machine for an example they don't know that i should install windows subsystem for Linux so that this project will run in system properly. So, find your mentor who will guide you and will gonna help you about the project and learning the project.

When we talk about open source mentor's are amazing they will definitely going to help you! sometimes they even take the google hangouts to resolve your doubts. so, you can join the mailing list and also get connect with the other contributor's as well.

Next task is to going through the Merged Pull Request when you go through some of these and understand How other contributors are contributing to that project. you will get lot information about the checks , CI & CD pipeline they are using and all....

Then, you ready to move to the issues section, in this start exploring the issues and find the issue that you can solve. if you are a beginner then you can start going through the Good First Issues and comment on that issue eg : working on this issue. so, the project maintainer will assign you that particular issue. then you can solve that issue.

This is how you can start contributing to open source.

Thanks for reading this blog.

Keep writing amazing code.

Happy Hacking!

Happy Coding!

Happy Opensourcing!

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