Ask HN: How do you start contributing to big OS projects?

4 points

3 years ago

I'm a junior software engineer, I've been programming for at least 10 years, wayyy before college. I am working on a lot of interesting side projects but I've never really jumped into a big open source project.

I recently wanted to apply for a position in the Firecracker [0] team because the project really interest me and gets me excited, so I thought that contributing to it would increase my chances of getting an interview for that position.

The problem I'm facing right now is that the project feels very intimidating, it's giant and I don't know where to start/how to lay down a strategy to slowly get myself comfortable with it.

Maybe I started with a project that is too complex and definitely requires much more knowledge that I currently have, but I would really love to know other stories and approaches that the HN community have to share on open source contributions other than the classic "start with the good first issue".

[0]: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

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