Tips to join the OSS community

Shogo Hida

2 min readNov 9, 2022

I finished these pull requests in a few weeks even though I just started to develop OSS projects.

Python

TypeScript

JavaScript

C++ (Still working….)

https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/87572

Here I introduce you to the tips I have done to start my OSS career!

Try to find easy issues (with good first issue label)

At first, you should try to find issues you can finish because otherwise, you cannot ever tackle any issues. As you know, it takes time to understand a repo so you need to spend more time if you want to code something hard like logic.

I recommend you take issues with a good first issue label. They are easy to finish. You can look for them on this website.

However, you need to pay attention to the fact that the issues with good first issue labels are fast taken so an alternative way to find an issue is to search repo by repo. It also takes time but you can surely find one which has not been taken.

Challenge your language skills

It’s also important NOT to limit language choices. What I mean is that you’ll have more choices if you look for issues with the languages you are not familiar with. For example, I’m familiar with Ruby but there are very few issues related to the language. On the other hand, I’m not very good at TypeScript but I already contributed to some TypeScript projects as I showed above.

Frontend issues are easier to deal with as far as I know because they don’t require logic and are usually easier to understand. What’s more, frontend issues consist of mainly TypeScript and JavaScript since they are the primary languages of the area.

Read contribution guide

You need to check contribution guide after you found an issue. This is because there are particular rules of repo and you have to follow them. Please look carefully at how to test locally, name your branch, etc. You also need to be careful after pushing the changes you made.

Communicate well

Good communication is another important point. It’s quite common to get stuck right after you joined the OSS community because you tackle issues on your own. You might not get constant or good support from reviewers or people who created issues. The community you joined must be active if you get such help.

Conclusion

It’s not as difficult as you imagine to join the OSS community. You will develop your programming skills through coding in projects where many engineers are involved. Take the steps I wrote here and challenge yourself to be a better engineer!