How can i teach myself to contribute to these projects?

[gekkonen@sopuli.xyz]

Don't learn C++ before C. C++ is a massively more complex language whereas C, once you understand the fundamentals, is quite simple.

If you want to work with projects that use C++, then by all means.

[inzen@lemmy.world]

Self taught programmer here. If your goal is to contribute code. Get the project's code, learn how to run it. Go pick an issue, great if it has a first time contributor tag or something. Try to fix it. If someone fixes it before you, now you can compare fixes. Sounds simple? It kind of is, but there are some side quests involved. This processes will force you to learn the bare minimum to get the task done. Your solution will most likely be shit but that's great, you can only get better. Programming is less about knowing how to do something and more about figuring it out as you go. Google, chatbot/llm, read the docs, ask others. Edit: Forgot something important: Be open to critique, programming is a craft and there is a lot to learn. Being bad at it is a given for most. Also most programmers are kinda bad at communicating so they may sound harsher than they are.

[manxu@piefed.social]

You are the hero your community needed! It makes a huge difference for a lot of people when they can read a screen without having to guess what the English words mean.

[bartydecanter@piefed.social]

I’m going to echo what others have said here but hopefully clarify it somewhat. For most FOSS projects you can contribute by code, documentation, writing/reviewing bug reports, or other project management tasks. The projects probably have a “Contributing” section on their website that will help you get started and might even have an “easy tasks” or “good for beginners” section.

If you’re primarily interested in contributing by writing code, then you need to learn to code. Pick a language that a project you care about is written in and find the beginners tutorials.

You going to want to learn the basic tools the project uses even if you’re not writing code just so you can interact with the project’s community, so probably git, their bug tracker, and whatever they use for documentation and translation.

And don’t be surprised if it takes a while to get that first contribution in. FOSS developers tend to become grumpy with time and generally have high standards, and due to the massive amount of LLM slop being thrown their way these last few years have often become even more so. But your work will be appreciated if you stick with it.

[carlnewton@feddit.uk]

Translating documentation

And translations for the application itself in some cases, so that it can be ran and used in different languages. Human contributions to the language files of the application is what my project needs more than anything else, and if you do speak a non-English language fluently, I'd be very grateful! Here's how I've worded it for my project:

If you would like your language to be supported, please create a new pull request, or a new issue with your language file, using an existing language file as a template.

[irmadlad@lemmy.world]

Just a note to say that devs of large, well established projects are always receptive to donations. A lot of these projects have demo sites, which cost money. So, if you can't contribute to the code side of the project, a few $$ here and there is always welcome in my experience.

[teawrecks@sopuli.xyz]

Probably the easiest place to start is appropriately reporting a bug that you're impacted by.

Take note of the version of the affected program you are using (likely depends on your distro). It could be that the bug has been fixed in a more recent release, and you don't want to create noise for an issue that has already been resolved and hasn't made it to you, or is specific to the build for your distro.

Once you've figured out where the issue must lie, make a report with detailed steps on how to reproduce the issue. Don't ghost the thread, if a dev asks followup questions, try to help give feedback.

If you're lucky, and they post a commit to fix the issue, take a look at it and try to understand what it is doing. Over time, you'll start to get a feel for how open development works.

[jensspahnpasta@feddit.org]

A few hints:

1. Start with smaller projects with simpler codebases. Do not try to understand what LibreOffice or Jellyfin are doing.
2. Maybe try to understand how one specific part of that software works. Chatbots are really, really good at explaining existing code, so ask your bot where the feature is located and let it explain it to you

[slartibartfast141@piefed.zip]

You could look through issues raised by other and try to replicate it. Offer your voice to confirm that there is a concrete issue, logs, steps to replicate, etc. As your familiarity builds you'll be able to identify likely areas in the code causing the issue. This really helps others to implement the fix and before long, you'll be the one fixing it yourself.

Also, look at codetriage.com.

[sem@piefed.blahaj.zone]

Do you know any open source efforts who will train you how to write documentation in exchange for committing to volunteerimg a certain amount? I would be interested.