How to Contribute to Open Source Projects on Github (pull requests)

I was just looking for this topic in Google. Lol what a nice coincidence 🤔

looks like im early

Love the content, Jacob!

Shame that most of the things I want to fix require major understanding of how the project works so they're not trivial tasks. Damn I wish I could just work on open source software 8 hours a day instead of my job.

What about a video on mailing lists lol

Get well soon, love your videos 💯

Great video. I think another important detail is that if the author requests changes to your pull request, you can actually go back and update your branch, and the pull request will automatically include your updated changes (in other words, no need to re-open another PR).

You can click on the filename:123 in the VSCode terminal to get to that line at once. And it's very convenient to work with changes (add files to commit, check what to add etc) in git tab in VSCode

They should have probably turn the 'rf2500_open' function into a variadic function when they change the api instead of breaking it...

Why is ‘git checkout’ the command to change branch? To checkout means to look-at but not touch, it’s really confusing terminology. Is there an extensible but more user-friendly and intuitive interface to use git with?

Did you know that you can hit the '.' (dot) key, and Github will open a builtin editor?!

They should have a CI runner for building the MacOS version, but maybe that's hard if it's specific to hardware. Definitely seems like something that shouldn't be too difficult tho.

Jacob, I hope you get well soon

Generally, I noticed the following problems: I use repository fast-classpath-scanner, but then I noticed some problems, since an original developer was busy, I forked it, fixed problems and continued using. Late, I did a pull request, the owner agreed, and accepted it. So far, so good. But later, the author did some extension, changed API and I reminded using my fork. Why? I didn't need new features, and say more, I didn't want to continuously change my code accordingly the product changes. But, since new versions of Java were available, I need to do changers in the implementation, I started doing myself, but then just borrowed changes from the original projects. Conclusion: fork instead of pull requests, because you may have different view on a product change, but borrow some useful changes in it time to time.

Very helpful! Not only the pull request, but also seeing you create the fix branch, and push it back in with origin.

Here is my experience with contributing to Open Source projects:
1- You need to have a very good understanding of the repository you are contributing to. This is why you're much less likely to succeed if you go in with the mindset "I want to contribute to open source" instead of "This open source tool that I use often and know has an issue, maybe I can fix that".
So don't expect to fix an issue within a repository that you barely know.
2- You need to understand the field that a repo belongs to. It's unlikely that you will contribute to an operating system if you don't have a solid background in operating systems.
I believe that open source contribution is a little overrated. There are other ways to show your experience other than contributing.

so many arguments to pass to function...maybe it could be better to pass pointer to some device context structure?

great video

To keep a file open in VS Code, you can double click its tab (or file in the sidebar). You can also ctrl+click the "path/filename:line:col" in the error log and VS Code will open that file to that location for you.

Instead of right-click -> keep open,
you can simply double-click the tab.

Can you please teach how to build an OS from scratch?

What about beginners?

What about Sourceforge? Is it OK?

If he rejects the pull request, you can always de-friend him in facebook.

Great example. Thanks.

Thanks Jacob!

I have a quick question, but whenever someone makes a change to the code would contributers have to refork to stay updated?

Thanks for the video. Any recommendations on currently available opensource projects on Embedded Systems?