How Can I Contribute?

Audience:

Topic:

Contributing to open source is a great way to give back to a project you care
about, grow a community around software, and help make a project more useful.
But often those who want to contribute have a few assumptions or misconceptions
that prevent them from making that first pull request, including:

* I’m not a good enough programmer to contribute to open source
* I don’t know the repo well enough to contribute
* I don’t write code, so I have nothing to contribute
* I’m just a student / community member / manager / llama, I don’t have anything to contribute
* Contributing to open source is hard
* Contributing to open source doesn’t benefit me at all

If those sound familiar, this talk is for you. Lucy Wyman discusses several
ways open source projects need your help, what to look for in a project you’re
contributing to, and some first steps to making your first pull request. The
truth is that everyone who uses a technology can help that technology, whether
by submitting a bug report, correcting a spelling error in documentation,
submitting a patch to fix a bug, adding unit tests, updating dependencies. .
.the list goes on.

Topics include:
* Common things a repository may need help with (legal, documentation, bug reporting, updates, etc.)
* Skills you have, and how to use them to help a project
* Determining what a repository needs
* What to look for in a repository when you’re thinking of contributing
* How to submit your first contribution