Less Painful Open Source Contributions

There are good chances that most of the third party code you interact with on a daily basis is Open Source. If you are lucky it’s also maintained. You may also have contributed to some Open Source projects or at least you tried: by the number of stale pull requests on Open Source repositories I guess it’s not a happy experience for a lot of people.

Hopefully we can save some needless pain to some of you!

Let’s go through a list of mistakes you can avoid to make Open Source maintainers life easier and your experience in contributing code to Open Source software more pleasant. One day you may be on the other side.

Transcript

1. Less painful Open Source contributions Pycon.it, 20260529 Riccardo Magliocchetti
2. Riccardo Magliocchetti Principal Software Engineer I Maintainer OpenTelemetry Python
3. Less painful Open Source contributions
4. Terminology You = a person wanting to contribute to an Open Source Project Maintainers and contributors = people that are already actively helping in maintaining an open source project.
5. Contributing: motives
6. Found a bug? Perfect!
7. Error in documentation? Great!
8. Missing some features? Letʼs talk about it
9. Do you want green squares on GitHub? Maybe not the best idea
10. Letʼs start!
11. How healthy is the project? opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/#a-checklist-before-you-contribute
12. Understand the project
13. README.md
14. CONTRIBUTING.md
15. Find a buddy
16. Every community, its own rules
17. Letʼs open a PR!
18. An issue first?
19. PR description
20. CI should be green
21. Getting a review
22. AI, AI, AI, canta y no llores
23. Donʼt delegate thinking
24. Careless AI delegation
25. New maintainers will still be humans
27. Temper your expectations
28. No entitlement
29. Conclusion
30. TL;DR Contributing to an open source project does not only involve effort from you. Maintainers and contributors are most of the time volunteers. Maintainers and contributors capacity is limited. Use tools wisely. Be nice.
31. Thanks