Your guide to making your first open source contibution.
Open source can feel like a closed club. It isn't — but the door is hard to find. This repo is a curated, community-maintained set of resources that help developpers go from "I've never merged a PR" to "I just shipped my first contribution."
A small, focused collection of:
- Guides that explain the parts of open source nobody documents — how to read an unfamiliar codebase, how to spot a beginner-friendly issue, what to check before opening a PR.
- Curated resource lists organized by language, maintained by the community.
- A safe place to make your first contribution. Every guide and resource list in here was added by someone — and we'd love for the next addition to be yours. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
- You've never opened a pull request, or you've opened one or two and want to keep going.
- You know a language well enough to read code, but the social mechanics of open source are unfamiliar.
- You'd like a low-stakes first PR before contributing to a project where the maintainer is a stranger.
There is nothing in here you need to "qualify" for. If you can read this README, you can contribute to this repo.
Three paths, pick whichever fits:
- Browse /guides if you want to read about how to find issues, read codebases, and prepare PRs before doing one.
- Browse /resources if you want curated links for your language — tutorials, beginner-friendly project lists, and reference material.
- Contribute back to this repo as your first PR. Open the issues tab, find one labeled
good first issue, and follow CONTRIBUTING.md. Most issues take 5–15 minutes.
If you want a snapshot of your current open source footprint — what languages you've used, where your gaps are, what kind of contributions would help you grow — try the free Mergeworthy analyzer. No signup required.
This repo is itself a great place to make your first contribution. We've kept the bar deliberately low: typo fixes, link additions, and adding your name to the contributors wall all count. See CONTRIBUTING.md for a step-by-step walkthrough — written for total beginners, with no assumed knowledge.
MIT — use anything in here however you'd like.