by Cesare Rocchi

I am looking for PR friendly repos

by Cesare Rocchi

Tags: opensource

One of the ideas that I had for my monthly challenges is to contribute a pull request a day to an open source project. I thought the simplest contribution is fixing typos. Now, as much as you think it should be appreciated, it isn’t. Not every author of open source projects is keen to receive these kind of contributions.

A while back even Chris Lattner felt the need to confirm that “pedantic PRs” are welcomed in the Swift repo.

Fixing a typo or a bunch of typos is easy. The hard part is finding open source projects that welcome this practice. There are already interesting initiatives for first timers. Both First timers only and Up for Grabs are pretty cool.

Is there anything similar for typos? Or byte-sized issues? I am focusing on typos because most of the times, even if you find a simple issue to work on, setting up the environment to test the project might take more than fixing the issue itself. And even popular projects, sometimes, don’t provide detailed instructions to set up the development and test environment. So even if you start with the best intentions, you might get discouraged while trying to figure out how to get started.

With typos it’s easier, that’s why I am pushing on them. But I am open to suggestions, basically anything that is byte-sized. I am even available to put together a little website to keep track of this kind of projects.

Let me know on Twitter if you are aware of initiatives about this.