Contributing to OSS Projects | 2nd | week 2 |.
In this lesson, we're going to talk about how to work in an open source software project. It's important to understand the ecosystem, the community and the methods of any project before diving in. This is a question simply of respect. First, you need to investigate the project, understand its style, what the workflow is, what the scope of the project is, so that you don't try to bring in things that don't belong in the project, or at least without requesting that people consider it. See what communication methods the projects use. Usually, there's mailing lists, there are archives of mailing lists, so you can see the history, and maybe chat rooms that you can plug into. How are contributions made? Are they done through revision control systems such as Git? Are they done through email et cetera. Learn the previous history. Many projects have veteran contributors who volunteer to serve as mentors to new participants in a project. In the long run, this saves time for everybody and causes less friction. Before beginning to code, it's often good to volunteer your services for testing, finding bugs, et cetera. This is one place that projects are often short on help.