I came across a question on Reddit the other day, where a user was asking about finding open source PHP projects to contribute to.
The user in question has 1.5 years of experience coding in PHP, and would like to give back to the community. What struck a particular chord with me was this sentence:
… to be perfectly honest I don’t even think if a guy like me even has anything to contribute with
When building an open source project, project maintainers often pour their heart and soul into it. Instead of socializing, being with their family, or dealing with other hobbies, open source maintainers will often sit right back down at the computer after coming back from an already very techy job, and start coding on something no one will ever pay them for. They’ll toil away into the long nights hoping to make something useful and usable for other people to consume.
When so much effort is poured into something home-made, it’s often difficult to advertise it enough for it to gain traction, and without traction there are no users. Without users, there are no testers, no contributions, no code reviews, no comments. When ever you think you have nothing to contribute, consider that just by being the user of an open source project, you’re already contributing.
Your experiences, your encountered bugs, your successful installations, all this contributes - and if you leave feedback about any of it, you’re helping tremendously. There’s a ton of projects out there that are just getting started and just can’t get to the critical mass required for the project to take off on its own. Not everyone’s an HN/Reddit wizard!
While the other answers in the Reddit thread are valid - focusing on the projects you actually use would be very productive, given that you’re benefitting both yourself and the project maintainer - such projects often already have a large userbase and are bogged down by bureaucracy and the project maintainer’s lack of time. If you can contribute to something you’re already using, by all means, do it - but when a project already has thousands of stars, hundreds of issues and dozens of PRs, your contribution will be barely noticeable which, in all honesty, barely helps you or them.
This is exactly why we created the Sourcehunt series - finding and listing open source projects that show promise, but could really use some contributors, commenters, code reviewers, or just users for the sake of testing! So go forth, Reddit user, go forth and contribute! You definitely have something to contribute, and every little bit thrown a project maintainer’s way means more than you can imagine!
Where do you find projects to contribute to?