How to make your first Open Source contribution
In this tutorial we take our first baby steps towards making an open source contribution. There is a dedicated repository in Github [First Contributions]( https://github.com/firstcontributions) that we can use to play around and get used to the process without any fear of making a misstep or breaking anything. In this playground repo it does not matter if we make mistakes, that is infact why it exists for to allow us to learn the process in safety. The steps we follow are outlined below and this is what we'll do for every change in the future:
Fork
Clone
Edit
Pull Request
using this approach means we have our own copy of the repo and are safe to make changes without any chance of breaking anything in the actual repo until it can be reviewed and tested.
So for this tutorial we simpy update the list of contributers in contributors.md and then push this back up to the repo. Normally this would need approval from someone who has permissions to edit the repo directly, but for the first contributions repo there is a Bot that will merge our PR directly and so we can see the results immediately.
I found it was worth performing a few PRs on this repo in order to get the sequence down pat.
The main thing I had to learn was that open source does not mean you have access to directly update a project, rather it means we can view the code, and also submit requests to update the code, this is known as the Pull Request. At this point we are at the mercy of the project owner in that they may approve the change you made and merge it, or they can reject it. There may be valid reasons for this if the change degrades performance or mabe causes a regression elsewhere and is spotted by failing tests. Either way we are not guaranteed to have our change accepted.