You can often hear things like:
- "You should start contributing to an open source project!"
- "Why don't you just send a pull request?"
- "Doing OSS stuff will be great for your career."
from experienced developers.
While indeed it can be a great for a programmer's career, going down the open source contributor's path can be daunting. As a seasoned open source contributor, I'd like to share some tips and tricks on how to become a contributor, and how you and your company can benefit from it.
I want to show that there's much more to contributing than "just" sending pull requests — answering questions, blogging, testing, and more, are all important parts of open source contributions.