Contributing to open source is hard :/

I feel the same way, every time I try to contribute to some open source project I end up giving up because I get intimidated by the codebase and I don't wanna disturb the contributors on discord/irc with my silly questions .-.

Every time I give up I feel very incompetent :/

Shitting is also hard at times.

Side note: Be at it. You will be a rockstar in no time!

A good open source software project should be easy to contribute to.

I've encountered quite a few bad ones that literally takes hours just to get it close to compiling.

My personal opinion is (assuming you have the IDE and/or SDK installed) is it should be a single action to build it to get it running.

@Cyanide Side note: what's with all the side notes recently lol

@BobbyTables Hahaha!

@BobbyTables Side note: First comment is from the devil inside and side note is from the human inside.

Know what else is hard?

@neeno I feel the same

@Cyanide true

@neeno one day you will realize that every human is fucking incompetent.

@hardfault The world runs on a terrifyingly small amount of competence.

It's often a problem of context. Most of my contributions have been the result of my being an edge case user of a particular technology.

Start by solving a problem you care about and that's relative to a problem you have. Complete the fix, document the why, include tests, PR. They either engage and accept it with minor revisions, or they don't.

Trying to jump into a backlog cold, or attack an issue list without concrete experience in a thing will be quite difficult.

They declined your pull request eh

I never had any issues contributing to open-source :)

(mainly because all the projects I contribute to are my own)

@Nanos I wish I knew. I have several open source projects I started that get a non-trivial amount of usage but never have had anyone routinely contribute to any of the projects.

@neeno same here. Not that I've tried so much, because I have been really busy since last year.

Wherever you go, they keep on telling you contribute to open source.

Like what the heck. How the fuck i am going to contribute to a shitty codebase. Where you have no clue where to begin or what to tackle.

Sometimes i feel like fuck it let's work on a personal project where i can learn how to integrate a newly learned project idea would be more insightful for me.

I maintain way too much OSS. What about it do you find hard? How can I help?

@junon well can you explain how to find the exact open source project that match your skill set?

Like how come you can understand the whole codebase before you debug an issue?