Hi, I dont know if this is the right comunity to ask, please tell me otherwise. I apologize for my poor English, I’ll try my best!
I’m a professional software developer with about 10 years of experience. I have only worked on closed-source enterprise projects throughout my entire career. I am not familiar with the workflow involved in FOSS projects.
Is there a guide that summarizes or documents all the information or standards you need to know to contribute to any FOSS project? This includes the standards for commit messages, tags, and how to propose a new feature or report a bug.
I understand that this may be basic information for many of you, but for me, it feels a bit overwhelming. Also, I think that I’m afraid of working on a codebase that I’m not familiar with. There is also a fear of my own code being judged online. You know, you can never escape imposter syndrome.
I appreciate any info, hopefully I’ll be helping on improving some of my favourite apps in the future.
The FSF has some materials but this is from their perspective. There will be wide differences.
My advice, choose a project your interested in. A low hanging thing to do is when you find a bug put in a good bug report. If you want to go further, debug it yourself and send the patch or submit a pull request. Keep in mind most larger projects will have a developer mailing list or forum. One can talk through stuff on that forum to make sure what your doing is of interest. As far as VCS, I think most people use git but that too probably varies. Keep in mind to… the lead developer(s) will decide if they choose to include your patch in the main line.