Getting into Open Source Development

· 2 min read

I’ve always wanted to contribute to open source.

In November, I came across a tweet mentioning an article by Kent C. Dodds about how Open Source project maintainers can set up their projects to be first time contributor friendly.

I thought it was a fantastic idea. Setting up little tasks to give to people new to open source contribution a way to get involved is a great way to make it friendly and easy to do. So sure enough, I checked out http://firsttimesonly.com and had a look through the site which got me onto the brilliant http://up-for-grabs.net/- a website made to find projects that are actively pursueing newbies to get involved.

Kentico’s KInspector is a project Kentico launched a few months ago, which has been a great tool we have used at work to analyse websites we have built. I noticed they had a few issues open and I found an issue I thought I could solve, so I forked the repository and got to work. I built a new module to find potential issues with page aliases and sent off a pull request to get it integrated back into the main repository.

It needed a quick tweak, but it got approved and integrated into the main product and now has been released to the public.

I’m glad to have been able to get involved in an open source project and I will definitely have to do it again. It was a great learning experience.