[pch07]

I'm happy to hear that you were encouraged by my story :) It can definitely be scary to begin with contributing to open source projects but I would recommend trying to find a place to start that 1) has an active community with people you can actively talk to and 2) find a project that you find interesting enough to care about.

An active community is really important: just a year ago Pion had very little activity until Jo picked it up as a maintainer and was an incredible person to talk to, including countless questions about almost everything. I'm really not exaggerating, I was able to do this with almost 0 prior knowledge on Go and video streaming. Part of working with open-source is luck based though; not all projects make it, and people are working on things in their free time. I would try to see how active people are and also how nice they are, because if the maintainers are toxic then realistically speaking, you probably wont be working on the project for a long time even if you found it interesting.

Honestly my strategy sounds really simple, it's basically saying "just do x", which is half of it. My mentality going into it was to try something. If I didn't like it, I would just drop it and move on, but if I did like it (for example, finding a project interesting enough to help out with, or a fun group of people to work with, or just a place to help with small things outside of work) then I would tag along for the ride. Another way to look at it is that by contributing, even just a little bit, you don't have to be responsible for an entire project. Being able to make tiny changes can still be meaningful because it forces you to have to understand the other parts of the codebase, as well as why the changes are necessary in the first place. And if you're ever unsure about either of those, that's where the community part comes in: asking questions is key!

It's important to remember that most open-source projects are just things that people work on in their free time. While it is fun, sometimes people get busy, which is why it's nice to have multiple projects to contribute to. It also gives you a chance to meet new people, that can be from joining whatever chat they're using (like discord), making posts like these to show off things that you've made, requesting reviews from maintainers, etc.

Luckily for me, Pion ended up being a place where I found something to do and was given the time and tools to make something cool!