Where and how do I Get Started to Contributing to Open Source?

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FAQ : What are some of the resources, websites links that I should be referring to get started contributing to Open source?

Here are a couple places to look into to get started:

  1. Learn Git
    Many Open Source projects Use Git and GitHub or other similar websites to collaborate.
    Start by learning Git. Its a very powerful and widely used VCS or Source Code Manager tool.
    Try Git and GIT IMMERSION

  2. Search for first timers issues on GitHub or other websites:
    First Timers Only is a great place to start.

  3. @QuincyLarson has written an awesome article about how to get started and have your first PR in just 15 Minutes

More resources to follow…

Of course please leave whichever resources you have used or are using in comments below as well.
For instance if you contribute to Android or Mozilla.

Cheers and make a contribution! Its fun.

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I’ve found this site to be helpful in finding new open source projects to contribute to:

The maintainers of the site specifically look for project owners who are willing to mentor new contributors, and ask them to tag tasks they want help with as “up-for-grabs” or something similarly obvious.

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Yes - we are also listed on up-for-grabs.net, and recently started using the first-timers-only tag on our GitHub issues.

These are issues where we are confident of how to implement them, but want to give first-time open source contributors a chance to get their first accepted pull request. And we’re happy to provide coaching on these issues, too.

@raisedadead is the most active core team member in terms of creating and monitoring these, so if you have any questions, be sure to ask him.

Here’s an article about first-timers-only if you want to learn more.

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Find a project you actually use. There’s always some low-hanging fruit. Project maintainers are usually busy volunteers, and often have a day job that doesn’t actually require the use of their own project. So any time they do spend on it is more likely fixing bugs and adding features.

You can clean up ugly code or write tests for just about any project. There aren’t many perfect codebases on github.

It’s a good idea to open a ticket before actually spending a lot of time doing something. That way you’ll be less likely to waste your time. Maintainers are going to be more willing to review and maybe merge your code if they know it’s coming. Nobody wants to read a huge diff from an unexpected pull request. Also, they may tell you that your idea is good, but less important than other things, and you may be able to do one of those other things and get it merged faster.