Hi there, Thanks for visiting this post. October is a month that has become a metaphor for Open Source thanks to Hashnode's Open Source October.

You don't need to know how to Code to get started

I'm a newbie developer who was eager to contribute to Open Source but felt it would be overwhelming. I spent most of my Uni hating code. It was only during the last year that I seriously started coding after I started a hands-on Project.

I still don't consider myself an "expert coder" though I have learnt a lot over this year.

So, I'll address the first concern you may have in mind.

Do I need to know how to code, to contribute to Open Source?

Short answer - No.

Open Source is not just about coding. There are documentations (like How To's, Readme's etc) and translations that need to be done.

But, to contribute to Open Source, you must be comfortable with - Github. Because that's where most of the OS Repositories are housed.

My First Pull Request that was merged

I was researching about Product Management, a few days ago. It's something I'd like to do sometime later in my life. I came across a Github Repo that had a vast collection of links related to Product Management. If you're interested, you can check it here.

As I went through this, I noticed 2 links were not working. It was a broken link that was a Quora Answer by Jackie Bavaro. I noticed that one more link in the same section was not working.

I first copy-pasted the headline of the Quora answer into Google to search for them, as I found it was a very interesting question. I soon found those answers and realised that the link was different. Perhaps there were some changes made by Quora that led to a new link for this content.

I thought of replacing the links in the Github Repo with the new links I found on Google. It was to help the maintainer and the users of the Repo get access to it.

I forked the Repo and updated the link in the file, like this:

Now, I was ready to submit my first Pull Request. I was unsure whether the Owner and Maintainer would accept it. I even checked their commit history and saw that there had been some delays in merging PRs.

Anyway, I submitted my first PR & forgot about it.

A few days later, I got an email:

Yes, I was thrilled to see that my Pull Request was merged.

It was a turning point for me! This gave me the morale boost to make more contributions. I'm still working on a few.

Why you must contribute to Open Source

The returns you get from OS Contributions may not be like the typical expectations you have. But, let me assure you that it'll benefit you in unexpected ways. Here's a couple of them:

• You become noticed in the community
• It helps you understand code, better

To write better code, you need to be able to READ code and understand why someone has taken a specific approach.

Thanks for reading this and I hope this will inspire you to contribute.

#OpenSource