Lessons I’ve learned about Contributing to Large Repositories
Quantity changes the quality, so should our approach to the code.
Last night, I made two PRs for two different repositories. It was my first time to make non-trivial changes to those repos since I started programming back in the middle school days. Here are takeaways from my experience.
- Contributing to large repos is an important skill for real product developers.
- Don't try to understand the program top-down. Rather, build your knowledge bottom-up.
- Focus on the function that you want to change its behavior. Look for the piece of code by keyword; change, build, run, and see the output.
- Tracing an input-to-output sequence is not necessary to start contributing to large repos.
- You will eventually get the full picture of the program after making a lot of PRs.
