So this is the first time I am trying to work with an Open Source Project.
I created a Code Plex Account browsed for a project that I thought I might become a part of.
I sent a request to join the project.The project head accepted my request.
I have already downloaded the source code of the project.
Can some one just suggest what should I be doing next?
Since I have never worked with Open Source Projects the best thing I think for me would be to go through the code and just study it and understand how it works.
Apart from that I want to know what things many of you do when you are accepted as a contributor.
Also the project I choose to work includes ASP.NET MVC and a javascript library Raphael.js which I have no prior experience with.
So should I also start looking at it also?
Any suggestions are welcome.
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Thanks for willing to contribute to the open source world, but please don’t ask to be a contributor if you don’t know yet how to contribute.
I’m the owner of a library source code that have been written ten years ago in .NET. Despite that it is still used by thousands of companies worldwide, so I was in hope to get contributors to help with bug fixes and refactoring.
Over the last year I have accepted up to 10 new contributors request. Only one contributed so far.
His request message was a bit different. It was something like:
I have been using your library for a while now, and I’m aware of a few bugs I would like to address and I also want to extend module XXX in order to YYY because of ZZZ.
The other requests looked like (the following is an actual one):
Hi, I’m a professional .NET consultant from XXX. I’d like to give my contribute to the project.
So my advice would be to pick a project that you actually use and know how to improve it before. If you don’t know what to improve first, be sure to check the source code to see if it would be actually possible for you to add value in it.
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Get to know the code and get a overview of it. Take a look at everything, but don’t spend too much time. You don’t have to understand every little detail at first.
The first things I would do are bug fixes and requests. You can get to know the code pretty good by doing so.
After you did a few things, you can do bigger tasks. Why did you join the project? Where there any specific things YOU wanted to change?
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