Contributing to Open Source

(Presented at the Hack the People PDX meetup on 3/4/2015)

Miguel Grinberg is a software developer at Rackspace, author of O'Reilly's "Flask Web Development", and ranks among Github's most frequent contributors. Miguel has spoken at events such as PyCon, and maintains a blog about Python, Flask and programming related topics, powered by a blog engine he wrote himself. Read his blog at blog.miguelgrinberg.com

Transcript

1. Contributing to Open Source Miguel Grinberg @miguelgrinberg
2. About Me • I work for Rackspace as an OpenStack engineer. Before that, I worked on video servers, interactive TV, panoramic cameras and computer animation. • I teach and speak about Python web development at conferences. • I wrote the O’Reilly book “Flask Web Development”. • I wrote several open source extensions for Flask. • I write about Python, Flask, APIs, robotics and other topics on my blog: http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com. • I have 25+ years of experience as a software engineer.
3. Who You! Contributing to Open Source
4. Why • Sharpen your skills • Challenge yourself • Share your work • Improve your resume • Learn to work in a team • Network with peers Contributing to Open Source
5. Where • Get involved with a project you have used • Let your own project drive you • Find interesting projects (https://github. com/trending) • Not all open source projects are created equal ◦ Don’t like how they treat you? Their loss, move on and don’t give up! Contributing to Open Source
6. What • Report, triage or fix bugs • Propose improvements or new features • Answer questions from users • Write, improve or translate documentation • Promote open source projects at conferences or user groups • Release your own projects as open source Contributing to Open Source
7. How • Learn git (and use it for your own projects) • Lurk and watch when others make their contributions • Check the “How to Contribute” section in the documentation of the project for contributor instructions Contributing to Open Source
8. No, really, How??? “Fork & Pull” model (Github, BitBucket, etc.) 1. Fork the project 2. Create a feature/bugfix branch in your fork 3. Work in your branch and test your changes 4. When you are done, submit a pull request 5. Discuss your changes, and commit any modifications or improvements suggested to your branch 6. A project maintainer merges your change! Contributing to Open Source
9. @miguelgrinberg Thank You!