Avoiding Common Pitfalls When First Contributing To Open Source

Angie Byron, a long-time member of the Drupal community, offers guidance on avoiding common mistakes and general good-practices for those new to contributing to open-source projects: You might not know it yet, but as a newcomer to an open source project, you have this AMAZING superpower: you are often-times the only one in that whole project capable of reading the documentation through new eyes. Because I can guarantee, the people who wrote that documentation are not new.:-)

So take time to read the docs and file issues (or better yet, pull requests) for anything that was unclear. This lets you get a 'feel' for contributing in a project/community without needing to go way down the deep end of learning coding standards and unit tests and commit signing and whatever other bananas things they're about to make you do.:) Also, people are more likely to take time to help you, if you've helped them first!

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