As you know the open source festival in on going - Hacktoberfest 2022.

I always wanted to start contributing to open source, and this year I got the chance to do so.

Today, I earned my first contribution batch from Digital Ocean and waiting for the other three.

Being a beginner I understand the problems of making your first contribution. I was also lost a week back. So I will try to share the steps I took that helped me make my first contribution.

Step 1 : Register for Hacktoberfest 2022

Duh! This is the most obvious step of course.
Just head on to the Hacktoberfest 2022 page and register yourself.
But wait! You need to have a Github or a Gitlab account to do so.

To regsiter just click on the Start Hacking button in the Top-Right corner of the home page as shown.

Now, you'll have 2 options. Choose the one you want to Contribute with 👇

Step 2 : Finding the repositories

I agree, this is the toughest part.
You will have to find the repositories with the Hacktoberfest tag. For doing this, just head on the Github and search for hacktoberfest and you will the page as shown below :

Now, in the sort section you have different options to sort the results. What I did was sort the results with the fewest forks.
This way, I was able to find the repositories that less people were contributing to.
Being a beginner, you would find the to be the most effective.

Step 3 : Selecting the repository to Contribute

Now comes the part that I cannot help you out with. It is totally up to you.
Find out what you are good at. For example, I am good at development. So I selected Javascript as the language filter, whereas my friend is good at algorithms with Java.

🚨Important thing to note here is no matter what you are good at, you will always find a repository to make a worthwhile contribution to

Once you find a repository you want to contribute to, head over to the issues section and check out the issues you can work on.

And get assigned to the issue. This is as simple as studying the issue and asking the maintainer to assign you.

And voila, you are ready to make your first contribution.

What I learnt from my contributions?

1. Open source is friendly. Yes, contrary to what most people believe, open source contributions are easy to do because of the helpful community of developers and maintainers out there.
2. Only coding contributions can be done? NO, that is completely false. You can contribute to the documentations of different repositories. You can even write articles that count as contributions(The FreeCodeCamp repository is an example)
3. You can help others even as a beginner. No matter how new you are, you know something that at least 1 person in the world doesn't. That's your most important open source contribution.
4. Well, start contributing today!!

That's it.
I would love to hear more about your first contribution. Do share in the comments below👇👇
Also, do follow me on Github and Twitter