https://lobste.rs/s/4lplbe/how_contributing_open_source_helped_you?utm_source=tldrnewsletter

Many of the problems that open source communities face are pretty similar to one’s you’d face at work, especially if the company is a large, distributed one with many different products and needs.

I think one of the main reasons to contribute to open source is that you get the “unique” ability to jump into someone else’s codebase very quickly. My professional experience is only 5 years (vs 10+ years in total of working on x64dbg) and I’ve noticed that people think it’s normal to spend months on onboarding. People who contribute to open source seem to be much quicker with this.

The other reason I think is that you learn to complete a task/project without anyone telling you exactly what to do. I think this applies more to creating your own projects, but so many software “engineers” (especially at the start of their careers) cannot engineer anything. All they do is complete tickets without being able to reason about where their task fits in.

Since then I’ve done a lot of open source work. I’m a Ruby core contributor, I maintain https://www.codetriage.com/ which is a free tool to help people contribute (free) and I wrote a book https://howtoopensource.dev/ (paid). Here’s a talk I gave at Philly ETE about contributing https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-8UQMH6p-Mw&list=PL9oQ7yETvN13V5Xp7016XupVLg3WqiMtx&index=8&pp=iAQB (free)

Consider stating your own project instead of contributing to someone else’s. That way, you’ll learn much more about the craft.