Tiny Contributions to Open Source

Here’s my tip to start contributing to Open Source: Dare to make even tiny improvements. Probably smaller than that.

This one for #Rails fixes the formatting of a link in Markdown: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/44044/. It’s small:

-dialog, the request is aborted. Both of these options are powered by (Turbo)[https://turbo.hotwired.dev/]
+dialog, the request is aborted. Both of these options are powered by [Turbo](https://turbo.hotwired.dev/)

Here’s another, even smaller one: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems-mirror/pull/82

-    - from: http://rubygems.org
+    - from: https://rubygems.org

Both contributions were in the documentation, rather than the project’s code.

I find it easier to contribute to documentation rather than code. I don’t need to worry about setting up a working test environment for the whole project.
Generating the documentation on my machine and then checking the resulting HTML usually suffices.

In any case, don’t worry that a change is too small to be accepted

I will admit that one aspect of very small contributions is overhead. In most open-source projects, contributions follow several steps:

1. Fork the project (i.e. create your own Git repository with the projects code).
2. Create a branch in your fork, and make the change in that branch.
3. Create a ‘Pull Request‘ (sometimes also called a ‘Merge Request‘) summarising the change.
   Participate in the discussion (if there is any) and incorporate further changes as needed.
4. Get the pull/merge request accepted & merged into the projects main branch.

I recommend one more step after 4: Celebrate 🎉 at least a little bit.

For detailed information about contributing to open-source projects, I recommend the Open Source Guides.