First Contributions

What it walks you through

The README takes you through the full contribution workflow step by step, with screenshots:

1. Fork the repository to your own account.
2. Clone your fork to your computer.
3. Create a new branch.
4. Make a change: add your name to the contributors file.
5. Commit the change and push it to your fork.
6. Open a pull request against the original repository.

The instructions are translated into more than 60 languages, and there are separate tutorials for doing the same steps with GUI tools such as GitHub Desktop, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, GitKraken, Sourcetree and IntelliJ IDEA if you are not comfortable with the command line. With about 56k stars and roughly 110k forks as of September 2026, it is one of the most forked repositories on GitHub, which reflects how many people have used it.

Why this is worth an hour

The barrier to open source contribution is almost never technical. It is the fear of doing something wrong, in public, on someone else's project, in front of maintainers. Doing the entire mechanical process once, somewhere it cannot matter, removes that permanently. You also learn the vocabulary (fork, upstream, branch, pull request) that every contributing guide assumes.

What to do next

The repository points to lists of projects with easy issues. A good sequence:

• Read GitHub's "How to Contribute to Open Source" guide to understand project etiquette.
• Find a real issue through Good First Issue or CodeTriage in a language you know.
• Start with documentation fixes, tests or small bugs. Documentation fixes are the most undervalued starting point: they are genuinely needed, they get merged, and they teach you a real project's workflow.
• Learn to keep your fork up to date with the original repository, which the tutorial's extra guides explain.

Where it falls short

Adding your name to a file is not a real contribution, and it will not impress anyone on its own. Treat it as practice for the mechanics, then move on quickly. It also does not teach you how to understand a codebase or communicate with maintainers.

Common questions

Will my pull request actually be merged? Yes, in normal circumstances. That is the point of the project.

Do I need to know how to code? No. Only basic Git and a GitHub account are needed.

Can I list it on my CV? It is not meaningful as a contribution. List real contributions you make afterwards.

Best for: anyone who has wanted to contribute to open source and never opened a pull request.