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Introducing: How to Contribute to Open Source

February 8th, 2016 — 2 min read

Introducing: How to Contribute to Open Source
Introducing: How to Contribute to Open Source
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tl;dr — makeapullrequest.com and kcd.im/pull-request

Open source is something that I care deeply for. I've been doing it for a while now and I have found it to be among the most rewarding things I have experienced as a developer. Because I enjoy it so much, I've worked hard to lower the barrier to entry so others could jump on the boat as well.

The big challenge we face when inviting new people to jump on the open source bandwagon is knowing how to get started. There are various tools, protocols, and open source etiquette involved of which people are just simply not aware and which make contributing really intimidating.

This is a problem with education, and can be fixed.

It is for this reason that I'm super excited to release my new egghead.io series entitled: "How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub." It'll go through everything you need to submit a pull request starting with something as basic as setting up a GitHub account, going all the way to doing an interactive git rebase. And on top of all of that, it's totally free! (egghead.io ♥️ open source).

Check it out here: makeapullrequest.com

What this means for project maintainers

This means that instead of just saying: "I'll get to it when I can" or "I probably don't have time to do that, but feel free to make a pull request." You can now say: "Feel free to makeapullrequest.com!"

So, if you maintain an open source project, help make it easier for beginners by adding this to your README:

[![PRs Welcome](https://img.shields.io/badge/prs-welcome-brightgreen.svg?style=flat-square)](http://makeapullrequest.com)

And this to your CONTRIBUTING.md

**Working on your first Pull Request?** You can learn how from this _free_
series
[How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub](https://egghead.io/series/how-to-contribute-to-an-open-source-project-on-github)

If you don't maintain a project, you could always submit a PR to your favorite project to add these things too 😀 😉

Let's spread the joy of Open Source to more people through education!

Kent C. Dodds
Written by Kent C. Dodds

Kent C. Dodds is a JavaScript software engineer and teacher. Kent's taught hundreds of thousands of people how to make the world a better place with quality software development tools and practices. He lives with his wife and four kids in Utah.

Learn more about Kent

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