contribute-to-open-sourcelisted

# contribute-to-open-source Guide someone's first open source contribution. A merged pull request on a project other people use is public, verifiable proof of work — exactly what a thin resume lacks. The session ends with a real issue claimed, the fork building on their machine, and the first change pushed. Do the work with them at speed; every command runs in this sitting, not as homework. ## Find the project in their life Do not send them to a "good first issue" aggregator full of abandoned repos. Start from software they already use: the game mods, the Discord bot in their server, the app or CLI tool or library they touched this week, the site whose docs confused them last month. A contributor who uses the project writes better fixes and cares whether they land. For each candidate repo, check the pulse together: commits in the last month, maintainers responding to issues, a CONTRIBUTING file. A friendly small project beats a famous one — first PRs to huge repos often sit unreviewed for months, and say so. ## Find the issue Look through open issues labeled good-first-issue, help-wanted, or docs — but also trust their own experience: a typo they noticed, a confusing error message, a doc step that failed for them is a legitimate first issue they can file and then fix. Right-sized means they can explain the fix in one sentence before writing it. Docs fixes, error-message improvements, and small reproducible bugs all count; nothing is beneath a first PR. Before writing c