Learn about open source and how to contribute

A Open source software is a way of develop free software, from libraries or modules to an entire product. Is available to everyone and all can contribute this is and incredible tool because if you got the idea but you don’t have all the knowledge other people who got the skills can help you.

A lot of developers and companies collaborates on open source projects because it helps them to debug issues more easier or to make the software more secure and to add more features.

A Big example of open source project: React

React is an open source UI library built by Facebook (nowadays Meta) currently is the most popular javascript tool used on industry. Is well known that React has been mantained and updated by his community which is one of the biggest at open source projects, but there’s still bugs and fixes to work on.

Is very important to know that all the open source projects got their own community guidelines and there’s a way to contribute. In case of React it follows semantic versioning releasing patch versions when critical bug fixes exists.

But how can I contribute?

One of the first things that you need to have in order to contribute on open source projects is to have a Github account. Then, you can start looking for an open source project and based on your skills you can choose the one to contribute.

Setting up the environment to be able to work with the technology you choose is very important, after that you can start looking for issues and when you think you got the solution you can ask one of the contributors to assign you that issue.

Finally you have to submit a pull request and it will be reviewed by the owners and tested until they know it works fine.

### What’s open source?