Start Contributing to Open Source

date

Nov 27, 2016

slug

contribute-open-source

status

Published

tags

Tech

summary

type

Post

Just recently my first PR to ReactiveCocoa has been merged and I’m still excited.

I have been using ReactiveCocoa/ReactiveSwift since the start of 2016 and enjoying it very much. The learning curve is not easy, but once you grok it, its incredible.

This brings us to contributing to open source. IMO the easiest way would be:

Use open source codes

Find functionality that you wanted but is lacking

Fork the repo and make a new branch with the changes along with the tests

Submit Pull Request with you new branch

Action the change requests and code styling that many repo enforces

Voila!

That’s what I did in the ReactiveCocoa PR. I wanted to bind attributedText of a UITextViewfrom a MutableProperty<NSAttributedString> but the framework doesn’t support that.

textView.reactive.attributedText <~ attributedStringProperty
  .producer
  .map {
    // whatever
  }

Without the binding, I have to use didSet { } on the property change, which isn’t that bad, but could be better.

So my colleague suggested to submit PR with the changes that I wanted, and I did!

Further resources

There are several guides for open source newbies:

First Timers Only

Github Guide

Another Github Guide

Good luck!