Becoming a New Contributor to Open Source Software

Or rather, how I did it this time around.

This is one of the biggest obstacles I watch people hit on a regular basis.

I’ve seen a hundred false starts from recent grads and even people who have been working in tech for years. The obstacle is consistent, but the solution isn’t always simple.

Anyone who tries to give you a step-by-step recipe to get involved with any OSS community is fooling themselves- and you. But there are some general things you might be able to implement to help you get past the barriers to entry.

1. Get some context.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been able to contribute to a few repositories within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

I didn’t start contributing just because I wanted to have my name on the repositories, but if that’s your motivation I won’t shame you. My contributions were motivated by a desire to help close some gaps that I noticed which would be tedious for the existing maintainers and contributors.

I became aware of the gaps because a few of us at Sonatype have been helping create educational content related to a three week long event that we are sponsoring that is hosted by the Linux Foundation called Security Slam.