First Timers Only – Get involved in Open Source and commit code to your …

Welcome! Lets do some open source!

Contributing to open source for the first time can be scary and a little overwhelming. Perhaps youre a Code Newbie or maybe youve been coding for a while but havent found a project you felt comfortable contributing to.

If you have never contributed to an open source project before and youre just getting started, consider exploring these resources.

We asked folks on Twitter what they felt when they made their first contribution to an open source project. Here are just a few of their tweets.

Some had great experiences:

Some had bad experiences. The purpose of first-timers-only is to help everyone have an empowering and welcoming first experience as they enter the world of Open Source Software (OSS)!

If you are an OSS project owner, then consider marking a few open issues with the label first-timers-only. The first-timers-only label explicitly announces:

Im willing to hold your hand so you can make your first PR. This issue is a bit easier than normal.And anyone whos already contributed to open source isnt allowed to touch this one!

First timer contributions are normally very small and easy (One recent first-timers-only issue was literally three lines of simple changes! And the changes were described in great detail and tested by the project maintainer). But this makes it easier for the contributor to get the hang of the contribution process rather than the contribution itself. Remember, this isnt as much about getting your project features implemented quickly as it is about helping first timers.

Why is YAL (yet another label) like first-timers-only important? Because it makes a statement that first timers are welcome, that they are valued, and that they can start contributing to your project! Often the hard part of getting into open source for the first time isnt the implementation of a feature, but figuring out how to actually contribute code such that the pull request is accepted! But, oh the feeling of accomplishment when your first PR is merged!

Go label an issue or two with first-timers-only and advertise that those issues exist! Walk a newbie a week (or a month) through the process! Document the process, blog and tweet about it and encourage those first timers to do the same! And add this badge to your repos README:

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Kent C. Dodds proposed First Timers Only to get new people to make their first contribution. Scott Hanselman blogged about Bringing Kindness Back to Open Source, so it was obvious that we team up and promote these ideas and get more folks involved in open source.

James Spencer created a great twitter account called @yourfirstpr that exists to showcase great issues that a newbie can solve in order to create Your First Pull Request! We recommend you follow @yourfirstpr and let them know if your OSS project has a first-timers-only tag and you have open issues that youll reserve for a new contributor!

Utkarsh Upadhyay created a bot called @first_tmrs_only which tweets when a new first-timers-only issue is posted on GitHub. Follow it to stay abreast with latest first-timers-only issues!

Angie Gonzalez and Arlene Perez created a GitHub app called First Timers that automates most of the process of creating first-timers-only issues. Install the app on your repositories and commit simple changes to branches with names starting with first-timers- the First Timers App will turn it into a fully fledged issue with all information a first-time Open Source contributor will need to make their first pull request.

We believe - and we hope you do too - that learning how to code, how to think, and how to contribute to open source can empower the next generation of coders and creators. We VALUE first time contributors and we want them to know that everyone started somewhere! Start here!

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First Timers Only - Get involved in Open Source and commit code to your ...