From Scared of the Repo to Mentoring People Into It
Description and use
The author shares how tackling small, edge‑focused tasks in large open‑source projects helped them move from a hesitant contributor to a GSoC mentor, offering a repeatable strategy for newcomers.
Problem
New contributors feel intimidated by large open‑source projects and hesitate to submit pull requests.
Outcome
By tackling small, edge‑focused tasks, the author gained experience, earned merges, and eventually mentored others, demonstrating a scalable path from newcomer to contributor leader.
Workflow
- Identify a large project
- Focus on edge areas (docs, tests, CI, tooling)
- Find an annoying or flaky task
- Submit a small, focused PR
- Receive feedback and merge
- Repeat to build confidence
- Transition to mentoring new contributors
Evidence
Everyone's first open source contribution starts the same way: you find a huge, famous project, open the code, and immediately feel like you wandered into the cockpit of a plane mid-flight.
Your first contribution to a massive project is almost never the exciting distributed‑systems wizardry.
If you're staring at kubernetes/kubernetes or prometheus/prometheus wondering how anyone contributes to that, here's my actual advice: don't look for the impressive change. Look for the annoying one.
The gap between mentee and mentor felt like a canyon when I was staring up at it. Turns out it's one year and a pile of small, finished contributions.
- Record date: 2026-10-13T14:41:24.260Z