How to Open Source: The missing open source handbook for new contributors

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Contributing to open source can be scary, but it doesn't have to be. This is the missing handbook that will guide you from making your first contribution to building a sustainable practice.

Developers tell me...

  1. "I don't have time."
  2. "I've tried, and it didn't work."
  3. "Working in public is scary."
  4. "I'm not experienced enough."
  5. "It's too overwhelming to start."
  6. "I need a beginning issue."
  7. "I couldn't get the maintainer's attention."


If you resonate with any of the above, don’t worry. A lot of developers struggle with these things. In fact, you are part of the majority. These are the issues keeping MOST people from hitting their contribution goals despite their best intentions. The good news is, they can all be mitigated. How to Open Source covers all of that in the book. Don't think you can do this at all because you simply don't have the time? Download this free chapter and see how others fit contribution time into their schedule.

Sounds great. What topics are covered exactly?

  1. Go beyond simple "how to" tasks to understand WHY contributors are successful.
  2. Find your next contribution opportunity with "COIL" - a four-step repeatable framework.
  3. Use concepts such as "floss one tooth" and "bat 300" to get over mental barriers and inertia to get started and keep going.
  4. Shift from a mindset of "beginner issue" to "beginning action".
  5. Move issues and bug reports along by increasing the quality of reproduction instructons.
  6. Write A+ documentation, even for code you didn't write.
  7. Maximize your chance in getting your pull request merged..
  8. Apply non-violent communication principles and navigate conversations that get tense.
  9. See real life examples on how other people fit open source time into their jobs.
  10. Sustain your contributions beyond one commit to achieve lasting impact.

About the Author: Richard Schneeman

Richard Schneeman thumbnail
Richard has spent the last quarter of his life researching how to bridge the gap between projects that want contributors and people that want to contribute. He has conducted interviews, paired with developers, and made hundreds of personal contributions. He is most known for helping sixty-thousand developers contribute to open source through his platform, CodeTriage. He is a maintainer of libraries with over 1.9+ billion downloads. He currently helps maintain the Puma webserver, a high performance threaded webserver in Ruby. He contributes to high profile projects including the Ruby language and created several successful open source projects such as derailed benchmarks with over 2.8 thousand stars on GitHub. In addition to Ruby, Richard enjoys writing Rust and "any programming language that will get the job done." Richard lives in Austin, Texas, with his partner, two kids, and two dogs.
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