You heard me right. I don't think you should contribute to open source. Unless...

KEYWORDS: GITHUB OPEN SOURCE CODING DEVELOPING PROGRAMMING LEARNING TO CODE FIRST CONTRIBUTION PULL REQUEST

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S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

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Theo - t3․gg

Contributing to open source should be driven by real problems you encounter and understand, rather than as a means to get a job. Open source contributions demonstrate your problem-solving skills and involvement in the community, not just the act of contributing itself. Starting with issues and using projects you are familiar with is key. Setting effective goals in programming is important for growth and success.

Don't Contribute to Open Source

100% right. If you want to contribute - good. But because you want to improve something, not as a steppingstone 😅

<h1>They just don’t really know or understand the true spirit of Open Source.</h1>
<h2>Open Source is actually about -&gt;</h2>
<ul>
<li>Building projects in free time, maintaining them, for you or anyone in the world. Not for money but for the enjoyment &amp; passion of programming.</li>
<li>Depositing, releasing &amp; providing software under a license without royalty, that people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible.</li>
<li>Committing &amp; spending the most precious thing in your life(that is what we call TIME) to fix bugs of a free project that runs/helps run the world or say, daily work of ordinary people, like anyone. Not for money but for the passion of contributing to the society(community).</li>
<li>You should not have to pay for most of the software u need/use to run/work on your system.</li>
</ul>
This, is the true spirit of Open Source!
<h2>Who am I to tell this?</h2>
No one.
Literally just a fellow ordinary CS undergrad learning to develop projects and trying to contribute as much as to the world.
I may not have built famous OSS projects hosted on my GitHub; I may also not have hundreds contributions on multiple repositories.
But I know why all of it(open source) had started &amp; what are its purpose. A huge thanks to each &amp; every member of the tech community who introduced me to Open Source world and showed me the reason &amp; purpose.
Hopefully, I will be able to make big big contributions to Open-Source someday.
Thanks to all of them who read this mini article this far! :D
Have a good day!

These are very good points and a great argument.

i Love the comment of “@andybrice2711”:
&quot;I’m going to invoke Goodhart’s Law here: ‘When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.’ &quot;

I … kind of agree and kind of disagree.
It’s great to contribute to OSS because you have some knowledge, some spare time, and an itch you want to scratch. That’s great. People should do that.
It’s also ok to be early in your career, with some ideas and a whole lot of lack of experience. Sometimes the best way to get where you want to go is through OSS.
Both are ok.
What really matters is that OSS has contributors and can make progress. No?