Using Pledge 1% for Open source

One of the primary benefits (in my opinion 😄) we recieve at Easy Agile is getting to pledge 1% of our time (roughly 1 day a quarter) volunteering for any not for profit organisation. I recently used one of these days to give back to some Open source tech we use to make our apps radical. I'm detailing the steps I took for my future self as well as to encourage you, the reader to do the same! Now a lot of really intelligent people have written about this before, but having a familiar face write about it always makes it more tangible.

Step 1. Issues to fix, can be found by navigating to the Issues tab of a repository.

Most open source libraries have a "good first issue" or "good for first timers" label in their issues page. These are issues I was mainly looking for to fix to take my first step into Open Source.

Step 2.

The biggest challenge I faced was to find an issue which met the following criteria, 1. Open Source technology we use at Easy Agile. 2. Good first issue label 3. ~ 1 day of work.

I solved this by looking through Up for grabs as well as Good first issue for Open source tech we use at Easy Agile. These sites only filter in good first issues and offer additional filtering by language as well. Good first issue also has this button that shows the summary of the issues so you don't have to click away while perusing!

Step 3:

Once a good issue that fits all your criteria is found, fork the Github repository and work your magic you open source dev rockstar! ✨ Commit and push as normal once you finish working on it. Once pushed to your fork, Github will offer you an option to create a pull request on the parent repository.

Step 4:

Create a PR, mention what your changes are and make sure the reviewers experience is as easy as it can be! Some repositories have strict guidelines in place and can be a bit tedious to create a PR that actually passes the Github actions so make sure you read the "contributing section" (example) and fulfill what's necessary. Once your PR is created, mention the code Owner and user who raised the issue that you have a fix up for it.

Step 5:

Make any necessary changes the reviewers ask for, if any. In my experience the code maintainers are super nice and very stoked to have someone fixing an issue.

Step 6:

The best bit: watch your code get merged in and feel absolutely stoked to have contributed to a living and breathing technology that is being used by a large section of the world! ❤️