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Do you contribute to open source projects?

Shahed Nasser on April 11, 2022

Medusa is an open source ecommerce platform. One of the reasons we made it open source is because we love the open source community and how we can ...
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jzombie profile image
jzombie

Yes. I do a bit of open-source development myself and often find issues with upstream packages that I am consuming. I will often go out of my way to help debug issues with them, to not only make things better for myself, but for the community.

I've also contributed bits and pieces of insight to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, in projects that probably affect us all in some way or another.

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Shahed Nasser

That sounds awesome! πŸ™πŸ»

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timerunner2359 profile image
Ehsan Ghorbani

I would really like to do but I often think I'm not good enough to contribute to a project πŸ₯²
I also don't find a good project that looks interesting for me to contribute as a front-end developer πŸ’” because I never used them or I don't understand the code.
I hope that I'll find some good projects to contribute soon πŸ˜„

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

There are many projects out there that encourage beginners to contribute to open source. So, if you’re not feeling very confident you can start with them. Errors are usually highly tolerated and the tasks are relatively simple compared to other projects that may seem more complicated.

You can check out some websites to help you here:

firsttimersonly.com/

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Ehsan Ghorbani

Thanks πŸ‘πŸ™

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Exsan

Its great as you can encouraged your self to comment on this topic, not read only.
Im at beginning of contribution and i think practice more is the key.πŸ’₯
I hope to see you at huge contributions project🀩

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sherrydays profile image
Sherry Day

When it's clear how I can help and how I can get started β€” absolutely. I'm willing to roll up my sleeves and contribute something. When it's not worth it to figure out how, then I find myself not wanting to put in the effort.

Really great that Medusa is open-source!

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

That's a great point! A good contribution guideline is important for all open source projects to make sure contributors can have an easy experience contributing.

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theabhayprajapati profile image
Abhay Prajapati

I am frontend dev how should I start ?

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

At Medusa we have 2 storefronts that we currently manage. One built with Next.js:

github.com/medusajs/nextjs-starter...

and one with Gatsby:

github.com/medusajs/gatsby-starter...

You can contribute to those. You can alternatively create your own storefront with any framework of your choice and share it with the community!

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Abhay Prajapati

I would like to go with Next.JS

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

Cool you can check out the documentation, try it out and send any issues you find!

You can also join the discord channel if you’re interested in being part of the community πŸ™‚

discord.gg/medusajs

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theabhayprajapati profile image
Abhay Prajapati

even if I though about any sort of feature should be their add; then can i mention that in issues section.

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

Sure you can mention it in an issue or discussion

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Bernd Wechner • Edited

Yeah, I do. Then and when I have time and find a need. That is what FOSS permits. It provides software which I can use and when it doesn't work as I need, I can patch it to do that, and I'm good to go. Now, if I write that patch with the general user experience in mind and abide by a given projects requirements, I PR it. I'm losing count, but I have successful PRs to Tendenci, Django, puddletag, in relatively recent times and probably some more projects longer term I'd have to browse my own GitHub repo for inspiration to remember ;-).

But I admit I'm self centred. As I'm not being paid for it, I do this kind of work when my passion projects demand it, and I usually test the PR waters on any project with a small change before I do anything bigger. Try fixing a typo, for example, or improve the README. I call it testing the PR waters. Is anyone there? Are they triaging? Are the merging PRs? Because for better or for worse pick a random repository and it will be anywhere between supremely active and welcoming fo contributions, to dead as a dodo with nobody at the wheel anymore and anywhere between (the clasic mid-ground being, fairly active but the ratio of issues filed to people volunteering time to triage and act on them is poor and there's a large backlog of untouched PRs).

This is cute, I had forgotten I did this:

firstpr.me/#bernd-wechner

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

That's a good point about testing the water. In a lot of cases there are maintainers that don't have the time to focus on their open source projects because they don't get paid for it and have their own jobs to focus on. So, your PR gets lost with time.

It seems like you've contributed to cool repositories that's nice!

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Constantin

I did that a few times. Often through issues and a few times through code. Problem with that often was that the pr did not get merged in time. So I moved on to a different piece of code that fit better or just wrote my own. When the time came to merge it I already forgot that I had a pr open

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Shahed Nasser

That’s true. One time I actually sent a PR to Magento and it went through all the stages and they asked me to make unit tests and everything and then one day the PR completely vanished. Turns out they deleted it rather than just close it which I had no idea you could do or why they would do it. Oh well πŸ˜…

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Esmond Burke

I am relatively new to coding JS. I would contribute once I have clearer understanding. I am starting my journey with Kaggle because I have been doing python programming for data science for about 2 years. I would like to know how to contribute to DEV community.

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Joe Mainwaring

I've been contributing to the OSS ecosystem for about a decade now. My contributions primarily fall into two categories:

Bug Reports - When I encounter bugs with a dependency, I tend to search through the project's issues for solutions. If I find an open ticket, I'll add a comment to the thread to make it known that the issue affects multiple more than one person.

Bug Fixes - I'm not a fan of building fixes into your own application code for dependency issues, so often times I'll fork the dependency & create the fix for my own project, and afterwards submit the fix to as a pull request for the dependency to adopt. This has led to me signing CLAs for both Apache and Oracle.

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userquin

I love contributing to open source, I start a few years ago with some small fix on java repos, rn I'm contributing to javascript on vite and vitest. Core team member on unocss and vitest and a mantainer/contributor on unplugin-icons, vite-plugin-inspect, vite-plugin-pwa, vitesse, vite-ssg, and unplugin-auto-import

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Chantae P.

I did back in Hacktoberfest. But as of 'regular' open source projects, I'm scared that I'll either make the project worst than it already is or that I'll take too long figuring out a solution and then it's passed on to someone else. And also, all the 'easy' open source projects are already taken. But I know recruiters look at that stuff so I'll have to contribute eventually.

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Shahed Nasser

You're right, a lot of recruiters look into your GitHub and take this stuff into account. I suggest you check out First Timers Only because they have multiple websites where you can find a place to contribute as a beginner.

And I don't think you'll make it worse. One of the things that makes open source special is that we get to see different ways of thinking and approaching problems. Even if your PRs don't get merged, it doesn't mean that it was necessarily a bad approach and at the end of the day I'm pretty sure you would've learned something from it!

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Ben Halpern

I've made quite a few contributions to this one

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Shahed Nasser

And we absolutely appreciate your work 🫢🏻

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Sanket Mehta

Yes I am contributing to second largest CNCF project called OpenTelemetry. It is bundle of API, SDK and specification to collect the telemetry data from the application and send it to compatible backend to help developers debug the issues faster. The idea is to create an adhoc standard to collect those telemetry data for a number of languages. I have been contributing to its python agent repo and resolved few issues and added few new features and recently I have started contributing to its Php Agent as well.

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Shahed Nasser

Sounds cool!

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Athif binu

Taks

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0xKirz

now that's awesome

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Rafael Osipov • Edited

Yes, I work on several personal open source projects and have contributed to other projects (Tiled game map editor) as software developer and user interface translator.

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Andrew Baisden

Lately no but it is a great way to gain some experience.

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Antonio Luciano

Check out the projects at blisslabs.org to contribute to open source. It's a 501 c3 nonprofit organization

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Yassin Eldeeb πŸ¦€ • Edited

I do from time to time but mostly I do my own ones.

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Tawhid

Absolutely! When I like something and can understand the source code well,I want to improve it and I do! Like: Unreal Engine,open source tools,Linux Kernel and many more

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Shahed Nasser

That sounds so cool 🀩

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Drew Ronsman

I probably would just spaghettify the code lol. Maybe when I'm older and have more experience I will contribute

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Diego (Relatable Code)

Definitely try to when I can, especially if its a bug thats personally affecting me! Glad you open-sourced it, though. Seems to be the future of products is open sourcing several parts.

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Shahed Nasser

We love open source and working with the community and that’s why the company founders decided to open source it!

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Thomas Gerber

Faros Community Edition (github.com/faros-ai/faros-communit...) uses and contributes to Airbyte (github.com/airbytehq/airbyte).