by Cesare Rocchi

Fostering Open Source Contributions by First Timers

by Cesare Rocchi

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Try to remember the first time you tried to contribute some code to an open source project. Even if you are a great developer there’s a lot behind a good contribution:

  • requirements about tests
  • how a pull request is managed
  • code formatting guidelines

If you manage an open source project and you welcome contributions, try to make it easy.

Kent C. Dodds had a very cool idea. He just wrote the tests and a very detailed description of a feature. Then he specifically requested a PR only from first timers. It didn’t take long to get one. All the details here.

Unfortunately it’s not possible to search the whole Github by label AFAIK. It’d be a cool weekend project to put together some crawler that collects open source projects that foster contributions by first timers.