Becoming a new contributor to open source software is one of the biggest obstacles I watch people hit regularly.
I’ve seen a hundred false starts from recent grads and even people who have been working in tech for years. The obstacle is consistent, but the solution isn’t always simple.
Anyone who tries to give you a canonical recipe to get involved with any OSS community is fooling themselves–and you. But there are some general things you might be able to implement to help you get past the barriers to entry.
1. Get some context
Over the past two weeks, I’ve contributed to a few repositories within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
I didn’t start contributing just because I wanted to have my name on the repositories, but if that’s your motivation, I won’t shame you. My contributions were motivated by a desire to help close some gaps, which I noticed would be tedious for the existing maintainers and contributors.
I became aware of the gaps because some of us at Sonatype are helping create educational content related to Security Slam, a three-week-long event hosted by the Linux Foundation.
It was quickly clear to me that this is a tedious process for maintainers to do alone, so it was a prime opportunity to contribute.
Tedious tasks like this are common to open source communities year-round. If you keep an eye on community channels to spot them when they arise, these are prime entry points for new open source contributors.

Given this effort was being made across the CNCF ecosystem, I reached out to a single repository within the Argo project to see if I could help implement the recommended security standards. Since I already had some familiarity with the community that maintains the repo, I decided that was (Read more...)