How To Contribute To Open Source Without Being a Programming Rock Star

Esther Schindler writes "Plenty of people want to get involved in open source, but don't know where to start. In this article, Andy Lester lists several ways to help out even if you lack confidence in your technical chops. Here are a couple of his suggestions: 'Maintenance of code and the systems surrounding the code often are neglected in the rush to create new features and to fix bugs. Look to these areas as an easy way to get your foot into a project. Most projects have a publicly visible trouble ticket system, linked from the front page of the project’s website and included in the documentation. It’s the primary conduit of communication between the users and the developers. Keeping it current is a great way to help the project. You may need to get special permissions in the ticketing system, which most project leaders will be glad to give you when you say you want to help clean up the tickets.'" What's your favorite low-profile way to contribute?

Comments

Re:The most needed thing...

[TheRaven64]

Shame you're posting at 0. If you aren't a great coder, read some existing code and document what it does. If you don't understand it, probably the next person along won't either. Find the person who wrote it and get them to give you a quick explanation, then write up that explanation in more details. Add doxygen comments. This is also a great way of learning a new codebase. If you think something is wrong, ask - you may have just spotted a bug.

Beyond that, look at the bug tracking system. See if you can reproduce bugs. If you can, try to produce a reduced test case. Detailed bug reports are incredibly valuable. Taking a bug report that says 'foo doesn't work' and saying 'when given X input, foo crashes with this stack trace. Valgrind output is {attached}. Problem appears to be in bar.c, but I don't know enough to fix it.' is amazingly valuable. Even just looking at the bugs, working out which person is most likely to be able to fix it, and making sure that they are aware of the bug is helpful. One of the best things about LLVM's development model is that when someone files a bug related to my code it gets assigned to me quickly, so I don't have to spend any time reading bug reports - ones I am likely to be able / wiling to fix are emailed to me automatically. This only happens because people are paid to do it. On other projects, volunteers who are willing to do this (tedious) work are worth their weight in gold.

Re:The most needed thing...

[ProppaT]

I think this is everyone's biggest issue with Open Source. It also seems to be the "least wanted" by programmers working on the projects.

As a professional tech writer, I've offered my services to a few open source projects that I'm a fan of but feel have a major lack of documentation. In each case I've been rejected. I've basically been told, "Our programmers write all of our documentation." The existing documentation in each case might as well say "just figure it out." I've offered GUI design in the past as well. Lets just say this didn't go over well at all.

It seems that Open Source is a programmers club more than anything. It's a real shame. There's so much talented work going into the development of the software that it would be nice if the rest of the work (documentation, gui design, graphic design, etc) was doled out to the experts. There's nothing wrong with admitting that you're not super talented at everything.