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Open source is more fun with friends. If you don't have the time or energy to contribute yourself, I have a way for you to live vicariously: sponsor me on GitHub and I'll send you updates about what I'm working on. I'll also take feedback on what *you* think I should work on.

For Black Friday, I'm readjusting my GitHub sponsor goals. Instead of targeting specific dollar amounts, I've changed my goal to 10 monthly sponsors (any dollar amount). github.com/sponsors/coo...

If you contribute any dollar amount on any cadence, I'll be happy to add you to a private, bi-weekly newsletter about what I'm up to in open source (entirely opt-in).

How did you get into contributing to open source projects? I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say it’s hard to figure out where to contribute. And even when an opportunity seems promising, it’s tough to know if my contribution is even needed or part of the vision of the project.

In my case: - I volunteered to write a Redux "FAQ" page in early 2016 - Dan merged, gave me commit rights - A few months later he was busy with React, and said "here's the lib, have fun" blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2016/09/how-...

Generalizing from my experience + observations: - Biggest factor is showing up and being helpful over time. This gets you involved _and_ shows maintainers you care and can be trusted - Docs are always a great place to start. Every project needs better docs!

Exactly! I found that contributing to smaller active projects is much more rewarding. You can understand the context much faster, and maintainers much more active. No 1000s queues of PRs, etc. I find such projects using helpwanted.dev

The short answer is: I struggled with that for a long time, I still do, and I got lucky a few years ago when @jamon.dev presented me with an opportunity to take a leadership role in MobX-State-Tree, which helped me build up some intuition and resilience.

But here's a longer answer: Probably my first real open source was building this Markdown plugin for Eleventy: github.com/coolsoftware... Plugins for a popular tool are a good starting point, because you have no dependencies on other people, but there's a good chance you'll get users.

First you can peruse the issue boards. Just start answering common questions that you see recurring in a project you're interested in. Helping facilitate the movement or categorizing of issues for maintainers is super helpful.

This is very helpful, thank you! I guess I didn’t realize this was stuff that I could actually do as a member of the community and not affiliated with the project.

This will help you gain confidence and start to understand where contributions might be needed. For example, maybe the same question comes up over and over, perhaps the documentation should be updated.