Open source projects in web3

What is Open Source? In simple words, we can describe an open-source project as source code that is made available to the public to view, use, modify, and distribute under a permissive license.

Sounds interesting, right ?… It is pretty much interesting. So Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, update, and enhance as per his/her necessity or work.

•• Why Contribute to Open Source?

It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, contributing to open source gives you a lot of benefits. Some reasons and benefits are given below:

• An open-source contribution is a great place where you can collaborate with other developers by improving their code or correcting them. You get to learn more about programming when you are on your coding journey. During your learning phase, you only learn the specific language or basic syntax but during the learning phase, it’s difficult to understand how things can be applied in real-world projects. You know what someone is doing or has done, you can dive deep into his code and it will help you to enhance your skills.

• By raising an issue or even contributing to solving one, you can apply what you learn in your coding courses. This makes you understand the concept better and on a deeper level.

• Meet people who are interested in the same thing.

• Contributing to open source adds experience to your resume and increases the chances of landing a good job.

•• Ways to contribute to open source projects in web3.

Understanding the way the project operates should be the first thing we should consider before getting in to contribute to such projects. However, projects differ in the way of approach for new contributors.

Not all projects allow contribution from anyone, some require that you work up to gain the right to contribute while others operate on so-called benevolent dictators.

After you understand how a project operates, now it’s time to look at things we can contribute to a project. Contributions can come in many ways ranging from fixing bugs, correcting typos in the documentation, arranging folders from the project roots, redesigning UI, making comments on existing codes or API components and adding some functional features too.

Having gone through what you should know as a first-time open-source contributor, here are some steps you should take in general whenever you want to contribute to a particular project:

• Reach out to older members of the project community.

• Go through the GitHub Readme file for the project to see the code skills and structures and to write wonderful code.

• Reach out to the previous code commits from contributors and see the ways and rules you should take.

• Seek help from the community members about a particular bug or features you are interested in and seek advice too.

• Finally, read the GitHub contributor's rules and procedures to align with the community codes and conducts.

Contributing to open-source projects can be a starting point for a developer, especially those who still want to make it high in the tech industry. However, I urge beginners to dive into this act and make it a duty to contribute to at least one project in a month.

Here are (5) web3 open source projects you can start with as a beginner.

• Rxdb

A fast offline-first reactive database for JavaScript applications.

github.com/pubkey/rxdb

• Gun

Am open source cybersecurity protocol for syncing decentralized graph data.

github.com/amark/gun

• Awesome solidity

A curated list of awesome solidity resources, libraries, tools and more.

github.com/bkrem/awesome-solidity

• Web3 React

A simple, maximally extensible, dependency-minimized framework for building modern Ethereum dApps