How I Started Contributing to Open Source and Why You Should Too, by Marit van Dijk (2020)

There are several reasons you might want to contribute to open source software. For me, it was that I wanted to learn in a way that was more useful than doing programming challenges. So I looked into how I could contribute to open source projects that I use myself. After contributing for almost two years, I notice that I have learned a lot from my contributions (which has been useful at work), and also that I have made friends and have become part of a community. In this talk I will share my experience with contributing to Cucumber, including making an early mistake (merging something that wasnt ready yet) and fixing it with the support of core maintainers, and still feeling welcome Youll learn how to find your project and contributions to start with, how to connect with the community to make sure your contributions are useful, and the many different types of contributions you can make.