A Practical Guide to Open Source Contribution

A Practical Guide to Open Source Contribution (Matt Broberg)

You keep hearing about Open Source and its impact on your career. What you don’t hear is how to get involved beyond “learning to code.”

This talk will center on the fact you can contribute to Open Source in meaningful ways right now whether you know how to code or not. We will walk through practical advice that’s sometimes tough to find when you see terminology like pull requests for the first time. And we’ll review Open Source from both sides of the equation: how you can prepare yourself to participate in projects and what maintainers are looking for in your contribution.

We will cover:

• What skills you need to contribute—breaking down git, GitHub, and Markdown in particular and where you go from there.
• How to offer and ask for help—from the basics of how to reach out to the more advanced features of GitHub that help maintainers ask for help.
• How to setup a repository—given that most Open Source code is on GitHub, we will focus on what it looks like to contribute to an existing project, including its documentation for contributors, forking repositories, and creating a pull request.

You will leave this session with a strong grasp of key skills to grow that will help you contribute to Open Source and further resources to learn on your own. For those interested in increasing the number of contributions to their projects, you will have a set of recommended practices to enable contribution so you don’t have to go it alone as a maintainer.

Matt loves working with technology communities to develop products and content that invite delightful engagement. He’s a serial podcaster, best known for the Geek Whisperers podcast, is on the board of the Influence Marketing Council, co-maintains the DevRel Collective, and often shares his thoughts on Twitter and GitHub @mbbroberg. He’s also a fan of tattoos and cats, though remains unsure of Schrödinger’s.

Thanks to SPS Commerce for hosting and for sponsoring food & drink: https://jobs.spscommerce.com/

Schedule:
6pm: Doors open
6:30pm: Welcome and speaker
9pm: Close