A Beginner’s Guide to Open Source Contributions (From My Journey and Mistakes)

Hello everyone, I am Jayant Malvi. I am currently in 2nd year of my B.tech Computer Science in IIT Madras. So my journey started way before I actually started contributing. I was really intrigued by the open source world and always wanted to contribute to organizations where my work is actually used by real people. My first mistake was that I was just looking at how to start contributing—how to do GSoC and all that. I checked various GitHub repos, looked at good-first-issues, and always thought, “nah, I don’t know this, I won’t be able to contribute.” This was in my first year of college. Around the same time, I was also reading a lot about cybersecurity—networking, vulnerabilities, etc. Then in my second year, one day in September, I explored OWASP projects and got introduced to OWASP-BLT. The idea of turning bug hunting and vulnerability findings into a gamified environment—with bounties, bacon—really caught my eye. That day I joined the Slack channel and messaged the maintainer, Don