Open-Source is great, but have you tried contributing?
This could be a game-changer idea if I'm right
Hey, it’s me again!
Today I’m reaching out because I’d like to validate a thought I had.
I’ve been part of the IT industry for almost 20 years (yes, I’m starting to reach “old developer” status) and one thing that hasn’t really changed since I started working is that contributing to open-source for the first time is hard.
So hard actually, that many developers who would like to try it, decide not to do it in the end.
The process is not easy:
How can you find suitable repos?
Once you find one, how can you be sure the maintainer of the repo is looking for help and will take kindly to you submitting a PR?
Where can you search for OSS projects looking for help?
And the questions stack up if you’re an OSS repo owner looking for help, I mean, how can you find developers who would want to help you? Why would they help yours of all projects?
Have you been there? Have you published any OSS code in the past hoping that it would gain some traction and create a community around it?
It’s nasty. And while there are some solutions out there, they all lack something.
Either they’re just not straightforward and require you to network with lots of other people to get where you want to be. This takes a lot of time and energy.
Or perhaps they give you part of the information, like listing good projects, but you don’t really know if those are stale or are actually alive and growing.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the OSS community could have a single place to gather and look for something to work on, or even, find the help they need?
I have an idea that could help everyone, but I’m looking for feedback. Would it be too much to ask for 2 minutes of your time to check out this landing page I created?
https://lookingforpullrequests.carrd.co/
It’ll take you 2 minutes and you’ll understand what I mean. Heck, I even wrote a full post about this and my end-goal vision for this product, if you’re interested you can check it out here.
I’d love to know what you think, so if you have any thoughts make sure to leave a comment!