What open source really is about
Have fun.
You could stop reading right now. Contributing to open-source projects is not about creating a reputation. It doesn’t bring you any fame. You can’t force yourself to create, write or refactor code just for the sake of helping out. Although it might seem that many projects can only be sustainably maintained through more contributors, the additional effort for maintainers to review pull requests that got created due to the need for recognition actually slows down progress as those maintainers have to invest their time into analysing your code. And don’t even get me started with vibe-coded issues or code changes.
I am not claiming to understand open source and its contributions by any means. And I think everyone has their own opinion on that, which is totally fair because it differs depending on the communities and languages that exist. So in this post, I am gonna share my current personal opinion, which changes over time. It changes in every programmer’s lifetime with the experiences you make, socially and in terms of knowledge.
Contributions are not just coding. And open source is not just about contributions. You can give value by triaging and responding to issues, commenting on discussions, continuously improving workflows, updating dependencies, supporting others with the knowledge you have already learned, or really any non-code contribution as long as you interact with the people in a friendly way. Software is shaped by the people that build it. And you can help build this community around it.
Programming in this sense is the challenge of self-discovery. You have to find what you love. You gotta do what interests you. Your motivation is the only substance that allows you to perform at your best. But you may not know what motivates you from the beginning. Sometimes discipline beats motivation. Some people discover their passion through the discipline of showing up. Not everyone knows what they love from the start.
Start simple. Notice a docs typo, share personal feedback in a discussion, report an issue you stumbled upon in your own projects or just get in touch with the people of the community to see if this is the place you would like to be. Nobody is perfect, and neither are most first contributions - even from people who later become maintainers. And you will get a warm welcome even if you make mistakes because that’s human. Just avoid over-relying on AI to do the work for you. Learning the codebase yourself is part of the journey. Not every PR will be accepted, and that’s okay. Sometimes the timing isn’t right, or the approach doesn’t fit the project’s vision.
If open-source software has helped you in your journey, contributing back helps sustain the ecosystem we all benefit from. When you are working at a company, it makes sense to suggest sponsoring the projects you depend on. Because if maintainers can focus full time on keeping the software up-to-date via financial support, they will not consider changing the FOSS license to a commercial one. If everyone thought this way, everyone would be better off.
One thing I noticed during my contributions is that maintainers generally appreciate contributions which actually affected you. This might sound obvious for some of you, but it is a crucial detail my past self also forgot to care about. Fixing issues you didn’t encounter yourself can help you learn to recognize common design patterns. They are also useful if you want to get started with a project, on your way to finding your passion with discipline. However, by doing so you give yourself the huge disadvantage of not knowing the motivation behind it.
And I think that this detail sets apart “good” from “bad” developers. The former ones do not try to be the best, they just mostly do the stuff they enjoy. Open-source projects are created in people’s spare time for a reason. I couldn’t bear writing software in my free time which doesn’t affect me. But I somehow manage to sit down after a full work day, still having the strong will to submit yet another pull request to my favourite open-source project. Because I have fun doing so!
Feel free to share this post with the people you think could benefit from it.
Jacob
Lou
