JetBrains Technology Day for Java – How I Started Contributing to Open Source and Why You Should Too

Helen Scott

On the 10th July 2020, JetBrains hosted a Technology Day for Java. We had 10 presentations and the videos for them are available here. Over the coming weeks, in no particular order, we’d like to share with you extra resources that our speakers kindly provided and any links to further reading or code samples.

We hosted Marit van Dijk talking about contributing to open source. Marit showed us how to find projects to contribute to and how to connect with the community to make sure our contributions are useful.

We loved how Marit acknowledged that it can be scary to get started in contributing to the open source community and shared her own journey and the mistakes along the way. Marit called out that open source projects need many different types of contributions including code, answering questions, documentation, and testing.

There are several steps to the practicalities of contributing to open source which Marit also took us through, including setting up your environment and encouraging us to ask our questions and discuss our intentions with the project owners. Our biggest takeaway is to communicate at every step of the process!

Presentation from Marit
This is the slide deck from Marit:

• Collaborating to open source software

Further resources
Marit’s GitHub profile and Medium blog:

• https://github.com/mlvandijk
• https://medium.com/@mlvandijk

Open source projects that welcome contributions
In her presentation, Marit provided us with a comprehensive list of open source projects who welcome contributions from people who are new to the community:

• http://github.com/collections/choosing-projects
• https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/ (October)
• https://www.codetriage.com
• https://up-for-grabs.net/#/
• https://www.firsttimersonly.com
• https://opensource.guide
• http://yourfirstpr.github.io

What our audience thought of Marit’s presentation

@MaritvanDijk77 enjoyed your talk at #JBTechDayforJava on contributing to OSS. Thank you!

Patrick Kiernan (@hoss) July 10, 2020

Wow! And I always though I can never contribute to open source ever. Thank you for an inspirational session @MaritvanDijk77 #jetbrainslovesjava #JBTechDayforJava

Gurpreet Kaur (@kaurgur) July 10, 2020

Thank you so much.

And i must say. Great talk, you pulled there.

And the way you answered the questions is really good.

Therefore Thank you for giving us a starter pack in its simplest form to start contributing to OS.

code geek (@real_maranza) July 10, 2020

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