Like most people, I was hesitant to contribute to Open Source but yesterday I took a leap of faith and did it. My first pull request to an Open Source project hosted by freeCodeCamp was approved and merged into their master- yay me! As soon as my contribution was approved and merged into their master I wondered - why did I not do this before? There are many reasons - For me it was a combination of self-doubt of not knowing enough, not knowing where to start and fear of being embarassed by someone more knowledgeable than you. All of these I now laugh at in hind sight because there are plenty of projects available for newbies like myself, a lot of documentation about how to contribute and a very supportive community who are more than willing to help you rather than doing the opposite. My first contribution was a pretty simple issue contributing to a list of projects written in Markdown. I was familiar with Markdown, Git and the GitHub flow so in the end my belief ‘of not knowing enough’ was also made redundant.

There’s a lot of projects out there catered towards newbies with tasks such as contributing to their documentation. Funnily, the very project I contributed to was about contributing to Open Source by freeCodeCamp.

There’s a bunch of good resources out there which helped me to get started:

• Up for Grabs
• issuehub.io
• First Timers Only
• Your First PR
• Open Source Guides
• GitHub Guides