Contributing to Open Source, Then and Now

In October 2019 I wrote a short, very excited post about Hacktoberfest, the month-long event that encourages developers to contribute to open-source projects. “Open source is the future,” I wrote, and “open source grants people freedom.” I set myself a goal of contributing more, all year round.

I still believe the sentiment. Here’s what I’d tell that student now.

Start with the tools you already use

If I were starting again, I wouldn’t hunt for random first issues to complete a challenge. I’d start with the tools I use every day, where I already understand the problem. A documentation fix for a library you’ve just fought with is a real contribution, and maintainers value it.

Even when the code is never upstreamed, working in the open shapes how you build. My migration tool at Elanco became open-source tooling for other teams on the same CMS (A Resumable CMS Migration Tool), and writing it for strangers made it better documented and more robust than an internal script would have been.

Open source inside companies

The idea I’d add most is inner source: running internal projects the way open source runs. Clear contribution guides, issues anyone can pick up, reviews by maintainers, and documentation good enough that someone who’s never met you can help. Shared component libraries and platforms live or die on this. It’s the same muscle as open source, aimed at your colleagues (Headless Component Libraries, Chairing a Cross-Team UI Guild).

The hard part is keeping it small

On my placement I tried to bring the Hacktoberfest spirit inside the company with a small hackathon. Good intentions and generous help grew it into an organisation-wide event, and the extra scope meant October came and went without it happening. That story is in The Hackathon That Never Happened, and its lesson applies to every community effort since: ship the small version first.

What I’d drop from the 2019 post

I suggested contributing to a company’s open-source projects as a way to get hired, describing it as “a free source of labour for the company, win win.” I’d phrase that very differently now. Maintainers’ time is the scarce resource in open source, and contributions that create review work without real value cost them more than they give. Contribute because it helps, and let the connections follow.

A modern footnote

AI coding tools have made it trivially easy to open low-quality pull requests, and many maintainers are drowning in them. The bar for a good contribution has gone up: understand the change, test it, and explain it in your own words.

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Originally written in 2019 → What is Hacktoberfest 2019