(East Bay) Hands-On Demo: How Do I Get into Open Source Projects?

The best way become involved with cool open source projects is to start working on the documentation. This is true whether you’re a developer looking for a coding project to work on or a technical writer looking for experience with a new technology (and maybe a link for your portfolio).

You can become a contributor to any project you’d like to join by cloning a GitHub repo and submitting your changes as a pull request (PR). We can help you get started.

This demo covers:

• The need for documentation in open source projects.
• Some ways for developers to contribute to docs, and then transition from documentation to actively coding for the project.
• A tutorial about how to clone a repo, make changes to its docs, and then submit a pull request (PR).

We’ll spend most of the meetup cloning a repo to attendees' local machines (bring your laptop!), making changes to documents, and submitting a pull request (PR). At the end of the meeting, you’ll have a local copy of the repo that you want to start working on, and... you’ll be able to call yourself a contributor to a project!

You can clone any project you like, but for technical writers, we’d suggest working on one of these: The Lone Writer's Guide, by SF Write The Docs
https://github.com/San-Francisco-Write-The-Docs/lone-writers-guide

The Writer's Guide on the Write The Docs home page
https://github.com/writethedocs/www

For developers, pick a project you’d like to contribute to, and talk to us about how to improve the docs.

What to bring: Laptop - So you can follow along and participate yourself.

VENUE INFORMATION: If your organization can sponsor this meetup and provide food/drink, please contact us! Otherwise, we'll do without for this meetup.

WHAT TO DO NEXT: Work on the Write the Docs-SF Lone Writer's Guide! On Thursday, March 29, WTD-SF is holding a hack-a-thon: https://www.meetup.com/Write-the-Docs-SF/events/248343809/