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!

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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:

Pick something you already use. A React component library, a tool, a CLI. If you don't currently use anything significant, that's your first problem to fix — because contributing to a project you don't use is how you produce drive-by README typo PRs that nobody respects.
Filter by the good first issue and help wanted labels. 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.
For React specifically: the React ecosystem repos (TanStack Query, React Hook Form, Mantine, Chakra UI) all have active issue triage and respond to PRs within days. Avoid React itself — first-time PRs to facebook/react almost never get merged because the bar is enormous.
For React Native: Expo's repos are unusually beginner-friendly, and the Expo team actually reviews community PRs. React Native core itself is a much harder target.

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.