You NEED to Contribute to Open Source

I love how YouTube instantly shows me a video in the sidebar called "Don't Contribute to Open Source"

I just knew this had something to do with Theo's video from the title lol

As a dev, it is always nice when anyone (users of a project) can write clear issues. This makes our jobs as devs much easier. Some of the best contributors to projects that I have worked on have been people that create issues, respond to issues, and generally understand what is going on in the project.

Thats good advice. Not every beginner should jump into a big codebase, but everyone should be able to just write an english description of a bug / problem they encountered.

I'm early in my Git learning journey (as well as Linux in general). I'd love to contribute something to a project, but no matter how many videos I watch on how to do it, I have an overwhelming fear of doing it wrong and really annoying the main dev on a project. Maybe one day! I'd also like to bring in Git to my day job (Windows sysadmin) so I want to learn everything enough to teach the rest of my team.

As a non techie person in terms of diverse coding. Chris win util project is my first github contribution and now I'm learning to use github! Great video as always Chris!

We should all do what we can to grow the community. Even if you can't code, you can report issues, help test, donate to devs whose projects you use often, write documentation, etc.

I contributed to your open source project today! I appreciate what you've built. Also bought your wrapper!

Ya man, I really love contributing to open-source project big fan of Jia Tan

I'm doing my part. The sum total of my opensource contributions is that a color palette generator wasn't sorting properly and it annoyed my sense of tidiness. So I fixed it and opened a PR.

For the distro that I use is where I submit the most. It's a small enough distro that I can usually just mention an issue in IRC and they will look into it. I also provide a pastebin of the error log and if I found a fix I will mention what I did to fix the problem. Usually within 24hrs the problem is fixed. Excellent community where I am at. Even if we go days without anyone saying anything on irc. :)

I love this video so much! The entire idea of open source is to have as many eyes on the code as possible. So when people say "Don't contribute to Open Source", I'm left wondering why have your code be open source at all?!

@1:27 "Whether you're a developer, whether you're a normal person..." 😂

I think I understand but was a bit confused at first as you showed how you, the project owner/maintainer, use issues instead of how a user will use issues and pull requests. As the project owner you can submit an issue showing the bug and referencing the commit you pushed to fix it as a good method for documenting code changes. But a user would submit an issue documenting the bug, then if able and willing: clone the correct branch, fix the bug, and submit a pull request. I think showing purely a user's point of view would be helpful.

The project that you should contribute to is the one you like and am invested in

Also, that Gnome extension you love, or that app that has been really useful for your workflow.... Give the devs some money. Even 3$ can feel amazing. Do it, don't be a cheap freeloader.

Great video! One question: I can’t figure out where exactly to start with learning to code applications specifically. Game engines make games easy to create but to create apps you are just reading writing code with no simplification of the process, so is application coding just something to learn in a community college or something or are there good resources online for learning how to make UI and under the hood things and how to use toolkits like GTK and such?

Well interesting how this gets uploaded as I contributed to open source. I don't really contribute to open source projects much (I only done it 3 times so far). But if there is something no one else done, then I might consider contributing to the project. I mainly contribute to a project's documentation for installation.

I just submitted an issue in Magisk. I've been intimidated from doing so for a couple of years. The reason I was hesitant was because of the requirements. And because how huge the project is. I'm glad I did though because they made changes in the code. I hope to see the results on the next development release.

Thank you for this, Titus! You've really helped to demystify and lower the intimidation factor for newbies who want to help make open source projects better.