I attended the DotNetFringe conference in Portland in April, and I met some some fantastic people, learned a ton, and had an overall great time. The conference was focused on open source in the .NET ecosystem, and I’m definitely a fan of both of those things.
While I’ve been a consumer of much open source software for a long time, I’m not where I’d like to be in terms of giving back to the community (i.e. there ain’t a lot of green on my contrib chart at the time of writing this post). I want that to change, so I’m committing (pun sorta-intentional) to doing 1 pull request per month for projects on Up For Grabs projects.
And what is Up for Grabs? Up For Grabs is a project created by Keith Dahlby of posh-git fame. Basically, you add your project to a manifest of open source projects and associate a GitHub issue tag with what I like to call “shovel-ready” issues: issues which the maintainers have oked so you know that the PR is likely to be approved. I think this is a fantastic idea and really helps lower the barrier to entry for becoming an OSS contributor.
If you’re a project maintainer, you should list your project with Up For Grabs. If you want to get more involved as a contributor, you should gind some issues on Up For Grabs. Big thanks to Keith for making this happen.