While maintaining some projects on GitHub during ZeroOctaveJavaScript-Project, I came across many new open-source contributors. They are just starting their open-source journey and making mistakes. In the beginning, making mistakes is not a bad thing. But, correctly contributing to open-source projects is also very important.
In this article, I am going to discuss some tips on - How Not to contribute to Open-Source on GitHub.
Try To Understand The Project First.
Understanding the project like how folders are arranged? how files are linked? which tech stack is used? is the most important thing before raising an issue or making a pull request in any project on GitHub. Don't make pull requests or raise issues without reading contributing guidelines of any projects.
Always read the README.md file of projects where everything related to the project is written most of the time. Also, clone the project in your machine and go through every file once to understand its work.
Raise Issue | Pull Request (PR)
If you want to solve any bug or contribute some lines of code to a project then you have to raise an issue. But always check the previous issues raised by anyone else to confirm, if anyone else is working on or describing the same issue that you gonna solve.
Don't raise one or two-word issue, that doesn't make sense to anyone else. Always remember to add proper details/context to the issue because the issue is like a chain of conversations related to changes you or anyone else wants to make in the project.
Always try to understand the project deeply and then visualize the insight of the project just by reading the Readme file after that you can work on it and contribute.
Points To Remember While Raising An Issue Or PR
The more important thing, write a proper description and proper title to the issue and also add screenshots, links, and information, It would be much better if you elaborate on the approach that you used to solve that particular issue.
Make issues such that project maintainers or contributors understand your views and suggestions quickly.
Make sure to add complete information about your contribution like whatever you did in it so that the project manager can figure out your contribution and even another contributor can understand it.