# Contributing to Open Source in 7 Steps

DevFeed: [Contributing to Open Source in 7 Steps](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/contributing-to-open-source-in-7-steps-21059.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://jakeyesbeck.com/2016/01/17/contributing-to-open-source-in-7-steps/>)

Published: 2016-01-17T12:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Jake Yesbeck](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/jake-yesbeck.md>)

Topics: [Open Source](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/open-source.md>), [GitHub](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/github.md>), [Maintainers](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/maintainers.md>), [bug](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/bug.md>), [Ruby](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ruby.md>), [Library](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/library.md>), [Tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/tooling.md>)

Tags: [bug](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/bug.md>), [contribute](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/contribute.md>), [github](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/github.md>), [library](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/library.md>), [maintainers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/maintainers.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [ruby](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ruby.md>), [tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tooling.md>)

## AI overview

This article introduces contributing to open source through a seven-step process. The supplied text covers finding repositories with open issues, using CodeTriage and GitHub Explore to discover projects, reviewing a Ruby library example, and reading project contribution guidelines.

## Source excerpt

Making contributions to open source repositories is a great way to give back to the community. Open source software has a rich history and is a crucial component in many successful software applications. Most open source projects are maintained by either one or many developers for free. Since "free" is not usually the price of food and shelter, these maintainers are not available to work on their projects at all hours, most of them have day jobs so they can eat and buy clothing. To help keep open source projects up to date and bug free, members of the community regularly contribute a portion of their own free time. Since the start of the Year of Commits project, I have made quite a few contributes to open source software and distilled the process down to these seven basic steps. 1. Find a repository that has some issues A great way to get a foot in the door in an open source repository is by solving one of its open issues. A project is much more likely to accept code that addresses an open issue as opposed to code that is added "just because". Open issues are either bugs or feature requests and are tracked on Github. Some really great tools exist for exploring Github's vast index of repositories for relevant projects. CodeTriage is one of these awesome tools. CodeTriage enables a user to narrow down Github's list of repositories by programming language. CodeTriage has a very nice UI, ordering a very large amount of Github projects in descending count of open issues. Alternatively, Github has their own tooling around discovering projects with their explore feature. Trending repositories from this week or this month are available on a per programming language basis. The explore feature is great for popular projects but exposes far fewer projects than CodeTriage. To demonstrate a typical contribution's life cycle, the fetching-gem project has been chosen. The fetching-gem library is a convenience Ruby library for accessing elements of nested hashes and arrays with dot