How to Make Your First Contribution to Open Source Software

Hi, I'm Craig, welcome to the Treehouse Show. 0:00 The Treehouse Show is a weekly conversation with the Treehouse community. 0:02 [SOUND] In this episode, we're going to explore our wonderful community and 0:05 answer a question about beginners and open source. 0:12 Pranjal Agnihotri asks a very thoughtful and 0:17 common question about open source and beginners. 0:19 In his post, contribution to open source, he asked, 0:23 if I have not created any major product yet, can I contribute? 0:26 How do I find the right project? 0:30 How do I not break things? 0:31 Now if you haven't heard of the open source movement before, 0:33 you might not realized it. 0:35 But the majority of software that you used everyday is not only free to use but 0:37 it's open for changes. 0:41 Now so many of our day to day interactions are with tools 0:42 that are built by a group of developers who are volunteering their time. 0:45 For instance, this video player, 0:49 the one playing the video that you're watching right now, it's open source. 0:51 It's created by 207 different contributors. 0:55 Not only is the code available on GitHub for 0:58 you to look at, but you, yes you, can make changes to it. 1:00 Now, I realize that might seem out of this world if you're just getting started on 1:05 your coding journey. 1:09 But let's read a bit more on this post. 1:10 So to answer Pranjal's question, one of our wonderful moderators, Jonathan Grieve, 1:12 encourages Pranjal to feel comfortable to create what is known as a pull request. 1:16 Which basically is a way of saying hey, I'd like to make this change to the code, 1:21 are you cool with that? 1:25 Most projects provide guidelines for how to contribute effectively. 1:27 And as a fellow student of yours, 1:30 Ari Misha points out, open source isn't just about contributing to code bases, 1:32 it's also about making contribution to documentation. 1:37 And while some of the changes might require deeper knowledge, 1:40 don't let that stop you from being a part of it. 1:43 I love this, all it needs is a first step. 1:46 Ari then goes on to talk about other factors to keep in mind. 1:50 Now, since GitHub is social, you can take a look at the latest commit time. 1:53 All the pull requests, other issues and how many stars it has. 1:57 He also suggest starring them and watching the activity as a way of learning. 2:00 So how do you find a project? 2:05 Well, if you're just getting started, 2:07 there are a couple of great tools out there that will help you. 2:08 First Timers Only is a great site that helps you find projects that 2:11 are intended for new developers. 2:14 And Up For Grabs is another great resource to help locate problems to tackle. 2:16 On the Treehouse blog, you'll find some entries as well. 2:20 Check the notes attached to this video for more. 2:23 So what if you have no experience at all? 2:26 Well guess what, the flow is pretty easy. 2:28 I'd love to get you hooked, you don't even need a tool, 2:31 all you need is a GitHUb account. 2:34 So first, log in to your GitHub account. 2:36 Now take a moment and think about your favorite typo, and 2:38 then what we'll do is we'll type it in the search bar here. 2:42 So one of my old coworkers used to always misspell language like this, 2:45 you can read langauge. 2:50 All right, so I'm gonna search for that, I'm gonna click here and 2:53 I'm gonna click code. 2:56 And look here, language is misspelled over 280,000 times, 2:57 so there's 280,000 ways for you to help and that's just one typo. 3:02 So hey, let's do one that's near and dear to my heart. 3:08 Now a common typo for Treehouse is actually Threehouse. 3:11 Now, I'm not sure where that comes from, maybe it's an accent thing. 3:16 Anyways, look, over a 160, so I wanna help. 3:20 So I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna click on this one here from Eliza. 3:24 Let's do this, it looks like she built something from one of our react apps. 3:27 And here it is, there's the ThreeHouse React Course App. 3:32 So let's help her. 3:36 So this is in her README.md, and the way that you get to it is through here, so 3:36 here's the name of the file here. 3:40 This is what you put at the beginning of your repository so 3:41 people can know what's going on. 3:44 So let's volunteer some of our time to help Eliza out. 3:46 So I'll click and open up the file. 3:49 So I'm gonna click this pencil over here. 3:52 So it went ahead and actually created a fork of this project for 3:54 us and we're able to edit right here in the browser. 4:00 We don't even need to bring anything down to our computers, pretty awesome. 4:03 And this is using mark down, so this is a special kind of language, so 4:07 this making that when it was bold, right? 4:10 That's the heading there, so this, let's just fix this. 4:12 We'll say, Treehouse, there we go. 4:15 If you wanna learn more about mark down, we have a course for that. 4:19 So what we can do here is we can propose the file change. 4:22 So you kinda give a brief description of what we did. 4:24 So what did we do? 4:26 We fixed a typo, fixes a typo. 4:27 And an optional extended description, 4:30 this is a common misspelling of Treehouse. 4:35 Thanks for being a student. 4:41 We'll just make it cute there and, there we go. 4:43 And we're gonna go ahead, we're gonna click Propose file change, okay? 4:46 And what that does is it created a new fork for me. 4:49 I didn't even need to know how any of that stuff worked. 4:53 And what it says now here, it says to create a pull request or PR. 4:55 So what this will do is when I make one of these, it will send an email to Eliza. 5:00 And again, it pulled over what I said, this is a common misspelling, thanks. 5:06 So I'm gonna go ahead and click Create pull request, and 5:09 she'll get a notification. 5:13 And you can see all the pull requests that are open and 5:14 you see my 1 is open right here. 5:16 Here I am saying, it's a comment thing, and then I'll say, 5:19 This was featured on the Treehouse Show. 5:25 Awesome, so now when she accepts my pull request, if she does, 5:30 my changes will be live. 5:35 How cool is that? 5:37 Not only can you do that, you should totally do that. 5:38 What better way to learn to code? 5:42 You'll learn a ton by working with a team of collaborators, 5:43 it's a great way to help you build a portfolio. 5:46 We'd love to see your contributions, so please, keep us posted. 5:49 [SOUND] Thanks for watching the Treehouse Show. 5:52 To get in touch with the show, reach out to me on Twitter or 5:58 hit us up in the Treehouse community. 6:00 See you next time. 6:02 Let me know when you make that first commit. 6:03