Participating in open source has been awesome for me.
It has
made me and the stuff I make better.
A common
question that I get from folks
is how to go about learning an open source codebase and understand other’s code.
In my blog post “Open Source Stamina”, I make an
important observation:
You contribute best to something you use regularly.
So while it can be a lot of fun to just jump into any open source project and
help out. Sustainable contributions are best found in projects that you use on a
regular basis. You have a better understanding of the use cases of the code
which will help you understand the code better.
Some steps
Here’s a sequence of events I go through when I’m trying to learn or contribute
to an open source project:
Contributing Guidelines
Look at the contributing guidelines first! This can be found in the
README.mdor a CONTRIBUTING.md file in the project. If it doesn’t exist, then
file an issue and ask the maintainer to either make one or give you an idea of
what they expect out of contributions.
Project setup
When you set up the project on your computer, make sure that you first install
the dependencies and that the tests pass (if there are any). For JavaScript
projects, you can mostly do:
- clone repo
npm installnpm test
If all that works then you’re ready to go. The last thing you want to do is
clone a repo with failing tests, make your change, and think that your change is
the reason the tests are failing! This has happened to me 🙁
Follow the code
Next, I try to follow the code in my head starting at the entry point where I’m
interested in (like a function call, or a CLI with a certain argument). This can
be intimidating for bigger projects, but it’s not as bad as you might think.
In my blogpost
“What open source project should I contribute to?”
I talk a little bit about how to find where the code is for a specific API.
Break things
Reading and running the tests is also useful. Breaking things can also be a
helpful way to learn a codebase.
Log and step through
It’s a tried and true debugging mechanism: console.log is a great way to learn
a codebase. 👍 Even better if you can run it in the browser DevTools that’s also
great.
Read more about NodeJS debugging in Chrome DevTools.
Debugging Node.js with Chrome DevTools
One other thing you might try is running the project’s code in the context of
your application. I talk about this a fair amount in my blog post from a few
weeks ago
“Spelunking in node_modules 👷”.
Conclusion
Something else that I’ve found helpful is to ask someone on the project to walk
me through some part of the code. I try to make it worth their time by offering
to record our conversation and make it publicly available. This is appealing to
maintainers because having material out there for new contributors to watch is
very helpful. Here are some examples:
I hope this is helpful! Good luck!
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