One of the During my career as a software developer, I started getting involved in some open-source communities and actively contributor, I never thought to myself that it will leverage my knowledge and experience to that level it did.
Hence, in the spirit of open-source, I co-founded Memphis.dev together with my 3 best friends from college – A message broker for developers made out of devs’ struggles with using message brokers, building complex data/event-driven apps, and troubleshooting them.
Open-source software (OSS) is software whose source code in some shape is open to the public, making it available for use, modification, and distribution with its original rights. Therefore, programmers who have access to source code can change the code by adding features to the project or software, changing it, or fixing parts that aren’t working properly. OSS typically includes a license (Apache, BSD, MIT, GNU) that describes what are the constraints around the project and how “flexible” is the project.
Read more about it in Snyk’s article.
So usually OSS contributors start to contribute to projects they are making use of. For example, a developer who works with Redis finds it interesting to go deep into Redis internals, understand what’s going under the hood, fix bugs, or add new features.
Specifically for developers without any former experience working with open-source products, my personal suggestion would be to go over the CNCF projects page. CNCF is the foundation of cloud-native, open-source projects. Furthermore, among the backed projects you can find Kubernetes, Prometheus, and much more. Undoubtedly, it is a really good place to find some interesting projects to start contributing to.