<  Back to Sessions
Lightning TalkBeginner

How to Make Your First Open Source Contribution

Donna Zhou Profile Image
Donna ZhouAtlassian, Software Engineer

Have you always wanted to make an open source contribution, but not sure where to start? Getting started with open source is much easier than it seems. A year ago, I started regularly contributing to GraphQL Java and the GraphQL Scalars project. I caught the open source bug and made it a habit, and now I’m a maintainer of GraphQL Java. It has been an incredible learning experience, and it has been very rewarding to meet the engineers using the library all over the world. But it wasn’t always an open source fairytale! Many years ago I tried to contribute to another project, and it was a total failure. I didn’t have a great experience and it put me off open source for a long time. In this talk, I want to explain what I did differently to succeed this time around.