Resolve an Issue

Contributing to an open source project is a good way to get experience coding on a team.

Goals:

  • jump in to an existing project
  • read code you didn't write and either debug it or extend it
  • communicate with a (probably remote & distributed) team about scope of work and feedback on your code and design

Steps:

  1. Choose a partner to pair on this with
  2. find an open source project
  3. find their issue queue and/or roadmap (it's probably on GitHub) and look over their open issues
  4. choose a likely issue that you feel you can resolve -- if it's a bug, fix it; if it's a feature, write it
  5. if at all possible, write unit tests before writing code
  6. get feedback from project owners and push the issue through to being accepted into their main branch
  7. write up a brief report: what you did, what you learned, what problems arose

See also