I followed the hands-on tutorial in the Readme of the first contributions and made my first pull request to the same repo.
What a great start to my open-source journey!
I’m excited to finally contribute to open-source projects, whether it’s writing documentation, refactoring code, or solving issues. It feels rewarding to be part of something bigger and help drive innovation in even the smallest way.
Right now, I’m focused on understanding how open-source collaboration flows, especially how to avoid conflicts and align smoothly with project authors.
Another goal unlocked, and many more to come!
Is it truly for beginners?
The answer is. NO.
To make this blog clear before turning to misleading content.
If you were a beginner, you would need to learn the basics, DSA, and then build your projects. Focus on making your projects larger and complex. Get comfortable writing programs large enough that you can't keep up the whole thing in your head.
A good next step after that would be to use other open-source projects and explore them. That should be easy and natural as your projects get bigger. Make use of other open-source libraries and frameworks in your project. Start to explore their code. You can do it just a little at a time by debugging individual functions and methods that you call from your code.
It will lead you to start contributions. You'll call a function in some library, and it won't work correctly. You'll step through their code and discover that it doesn't do what you thought it should do, and it looks like it's fixable. And that's a good opportunity to start a contribution.
What are the projects you can start to build?
It should be complex.
It could be a clone like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. That will have enough functionalities to make you think. And then you can use any libraries or frameworks that will help you to build a good UI, routing APIs, servers, databases, and more.
Tutorials and other learning videos
Java Programming - Derek Banas
I hope this helps!