Don't rant! Become Social and Contribute back!

Tweet

Read the article on my new blog under http://blog.js-development.com/2012/02/dont-rant-become-social-and-contribute.html

Todays web experience has changed a lot and so has done coding as well. Everything is around being social, interacting with people through social networks, blogs or online communities. I love Open Source, mainly because you can learn so much from others' code or even just inspect it when you experience problems. Still, contributing was always a bit cumbersome in my opinion. GitHub changed that!

The more I dive into using Git, the more I enjoy the nature of a distributed VCS. Today for instance I found a very simple bug in the jQuery Validation plugin while browsing through its source. It was nothing special, but a grammar error in one of the german localization files. So, what could I have done? Well yes, just ignore it, open an issue in the according issue repository, download the source and fix it for my projects or...just fork the repo, fix it and submit a pull request!

So did I and so should you! If you're new, just get started with these steps here.

Setup your Git Tools

If you haven't yet setup your workstation to be used with Git, just follow the instructions on the official site here. There is a very nice step by step explanation with screenshots and everything you'd need to have a smooth setup experience.

Fork the Repo

Go and fork the repository where you found the bug. In my case it was the one of jQuery Validation. Again, if you don't have any experience in that, just follow the guide.

Get your repo and fix the bug

Get the source of your (just forked) GitHub repository. In my case it was something like

git clone git@github.com:juristr/jquery-validation

Then just fix the bug, commit the changes and push them back to your repo.

git commit -a -m "Fixed a grammar error in the german localization"
git push origin master

Send a Pull Request

The last step is to send a pull request to the upstream repository, namely the original repo (jQuery-validation) from which we created the fork before. Again, here's the doc.

The Result

A nice thanks from the author and your bugfix has been pulled into the master branch.

Love it!

Posts you might also be interested in..

Credits: Hoctro | Jack Book