How to contribute to open source

Aut inveniam viam aut faciam: I shall either find a way or make one.

Another ranking of people on GitHub dropped, and for the odd metric of 'stars from repos where a developer has merged PRs' I rank third, as of this writing, in the United States. Like all rankings, it's mostly lies, statistics, coincidence, and a reflection of GitHub's top-heavy usage.

But it's a nice metric because that is what I've focused on for the last few years: instead of trying to create some popular new framework, I've been trying to contribute more to existing projects.

So, free advice to the new open source contributor: when you hit a bug or a limitation in some project, file an issue and volunteer to fix it if you think you can.

You'll learn a lot from working in lots of projects - how do they set up tests and linter rules, what are their code styles, etc?

Don't use LLMs to do this. Using an LLM especially to write the PR description or anything like that cheats both you and them: you're missing out on the learning and experience, and they will become wary of automated contributions. Don't be lazy.

Is this still an effective way to stay in open source and do good: I think so. So, when you hit a bug, instead of doing a workaround, a patch, or switching tools, try and make a way by fixing it. Treat all bugs like your responsibility because you're an active community member.