How does one find open source React/React-Native projects to contribute to?
Posted by Raid_Shream_Dev@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 2 comments
I have been told that contributing to open source projects is a good way to get called back for programming jobs and build out a portfolio. I don't know where to begin with finding these and just want a wee bit of direction to get started. Thanks!
untold8@reddit
The other commenter is right that nobody recruits from OSS contributions cold — the value is different. What OSS actually gives you is (a) experience reading large codebases someone else wrote, (b) a public diff showing you can write code at a level that gets merged, and (c) a real story for interview "tell me about a hard bug" questions. Those compound. The "recruiters scan GitHub for green squares" narrative is mostly cope.
Concrete way to start, since you asked for direction:
good first issueandhelp wantedlabels. GitHub URL pattern:github.com/<org>/<repo>/issues?q=is:open+label:"good first issue". Or use goodfirstissue.dev and up-for-grabs.net — both curate maintainer-tagged beginner issues across thousands of repos.The first PR is the slowest — probably 2-3 weeks from "found issue" to "merged" because you'll be fighting the build system as much as the code. That's normal. After the first one the rest are 10x faster.
aqua_regis@reddit
Not true at all. Nobody will find you from your open source contributions.
Generally, you don't just randomly pick projects to contribute to. You use some open source program, find some problems, or improvements, and then check the github to see if you can help.
Generally, you have to be involved (in the sense of working with it) with the open source program in order to help.
Just contributing, as basically abusing open source as another form of "social network", doesn't work.