Slides from a student-led session at the Turing School on how to get started contributing to open source projects.

1. How to Contribute to
Open Source Projects
“The power of Open Source is the power
of the people. The people rule.”
– Philippe Kahn

2. Open Source
software for which the original source
code is made freely available and
may be redistributed and modified

3. “When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open
source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important
this would be. For me, open source is a moral thing.”
– Matt Mullenweg (WP)
“In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.”
– Linus Torvalds (Git)
“The only reason I've managed to run this open source project, is
that I have learned to delegate even the delegation to other people.”
– Larry Wall (Perl)

4. Languages
Ruby, Java, Python, Elixir, Swift, Perl, C, PHP,
Clojure, R, Haskell, and many more…
Companies
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Github, RedHat, Salesforce,
DigitalOcean, GE, NYSE, Chevron, Mastercard, LinkedIn,
Mozilla Foundation, Square

5. Top languages on Github over time

6. Government
• 18f - civic consultancy for the federal gov’t
• Indian Government recently adopted Open-Source

7. Why should you care?
• Create the future: tools we use daily
• Stand on the Shoulders of Giants: reading code will make
you a better developer
• Experience: contribute to software that most developers
and companies use
• Network: almost every company you want to work for
uses or is influenced by open source software

8. How can you help?
• Mild: spread knowledge, answer questions
- blog, tweet, stackoverflow, user group
• Medium: fix docs, report bugs
- api examples & project wikis, submit pull requests
• Hot: fix pull requests, check code coverage
- github, codetriage, openhatch

9. Where do you start?
Start by exploring a codebase you use…
• Discuss the good and bad
• What software impresses you?
• Where are you interested in working?

10. Process
Github => Readme => Contributing Page
1. policies, testing, style guide
2. set-up scripts
3. fork repo and run test suite
4. read codebase, become familiar
Practice reading code (don’t be intimidated), figure
out what’s going on

11. Resources
Forums & Mailing Lists
• http://www.codetriage.com/ or https://openhatch.org/
Search Company Pages
• https://developers.google.com/open-source/projects
Language Docs
• http://documenting-ruby.org/