Contributing To Open Source – Beginner’s Guide

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This course covers everything you need to contribute meaningfully to existing open-source software projects.

This course is taught by James Pearce (https://github.com/jamesgpearce). He is the former Head of Open Source at Meta, the company that invented React, Hack, and PyTorch, along with 100s of other popular projects. After 10+ years at Facebook (Meta), James became an expert instructor at joinTaro.com and created his own open source project, TinyBase: https://github.com/tinyplex/tinybase. Watch the interview with James here: https://youtu.be/D3WGcLyFvaY.

Slides can be found here: https://www.jointaro.com/course/become-an-open-source-master/

Watch other courses from Taro at https://www.joinTaro.com/courses/

Contents
(0:00:00) Course Introduction
(0:05:42) Instructor + Outcomes
(0:09:46) What is Open Source?
(0:14:10) Projects, Repos, Issues, Pull Requests
(0:19:06) The Benefits Of Open Source
(0:26:33) The Right Reason To Do Open Source
(0:32:27) Improve Something You Use
(0:41:59) Find Companies Active In Open Source
(0:48:59) Choose The Right Project
(0:59:39) Go With The Flow
(1:09:40) Identify A First Task
(1:21:46) Case Study: ReactJS Open Source Repo
(1:24:26) Find The Project Community
(1:34:59) Learning The Codebase
(1:44:04) What Are The Most Important Modules?
(1:48:17) What Opinions Do The Authors Have?
(1:52:16) Share What You Learn
(1:58:08) Start With Something Small
(2:03:14) Good Practices When Making Commits
(2:10:25) Be Like Water
(2:16:59) Anticipate Common Pushback
(2:25:39) Taking The Next Step

Thanks to our Champion and Sponsor supporters:
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Goddard Tan
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