Contributing to open source is a great way to improve your programming skills and help build a stronger and more collaborative coding community. As a beginner, you can get started contributing little things like fixing bugs or adding to the documentation and while this may seem minor, every little bit helps.
Not only does it help improve the project you contribute to, it helps you learn to write clean code. You review others’ code and have the opportunity to see different possible solutions to a problem, and to see what good code, bad code, and all of the in between looks like. Further, it is great to have the opportunity to work on something meaningful and share your knowledge to lead to greater development.
There are tons of resources for getting started and if you are contributing on GitHub, there are many different categories you can look through to find a topic you find interesting. You can find projects in basically any language and any topic – science, art, extensions, and games, machine learning, teaching and educational materials, etc.
Large software projects with complex issues are probably not the best place to start. But luckily, projects will have labels that can help guide you in the right direction such as “beginners” or “first-timers.” And those are a great place to start with simple problems that will not take you a week to figure out.
Working with GitHub, you should first know the basics of working with Git. This is a great place to get started with the guidelines set forth by GitHub and lists of projects they think are a good place to start. Further, you should be well versed in GitHub basics like forking a repo, pull requests, push requests, branches, and merging. Here is a great place to get started with that.