Ways of contributing

"As a new contributor to a project, you are an invaluable asset not for your knowledge, but for your ignorance." - Leslie Hawthorn

The most important thing to remember is that you are uniquely positioned to help your project. New members are the fuel of any open source project. While core contributors are churning out new features and bugs, they are far removed from what it feels like to stumble onto the project for the first time, to attempt to navigate through the many channels of communication, to read documentation, to attempt to make your first PR. That is where you can come in and help in ways that they not only don't, but can't understand.

By asking questions and documenting your triumphs and stumbles on your path to contributing, you can clean up the road and remove obstacles for the next contributor that stumbles your way.

So don't be afraid of where to start. Just get started!

But, just in case you are like most people who don't dispel fear by yelling it away, here are some additional tips.

• codetriage.com has a great step-by-step guide on helping projects by "triaging" their many issues. This is an excellent first way to dip your toe into interacting with a new community.
• Short Videos Explaining the Basics
• Read the Contributing Guidelines on the README for any project you’re planning to work on.
• Join any Slack/IRC/Forum/GoogleGroup/listserv associated with that project. You can usually find them somewhere on the README.
• Introduce yourself and ask questions from the other contributors. Most people are looking for your help and are happy to help onboard new members.
• Find issues to take on. The Contributing Guidelines will have more details about how to find and report issues/bugs. A good place to start is by searching through issue labels for beginners. They usually include labels like first-timers-only and help wanted.
• Search through code base of a project for comments with keywords like "TODO", "FIXME", "CHANGE". You can use todo-show on Atom or TodoReview on Sublime.
• Over-communicate with the community members constantly!