I’ll take this.

First of all, I completely disagree with one answer (with 1K+ upvotes) in this thread along with the lines, "If you are a beginner, don’t contribute to an open source project on GitHub! It’s a dead end venture that leads to frustration and anger!"

If something caused frustration and anger in someone, that doesn’t mean the same thing would be causing similar reaction in you. I am sorry but that was negative prospective.

In fact, contributing to open-source is something which sets you apart from beginner and intermediate or experienced. It gives you boost to advance further in your tech or coding journey. Of course, you don’t want to be beginner for forever, do you?

I highly encourage beginners to contribute to open-source on GitHub and I’ll show exactly how you can do that right after reading this answer.

A lot of people think contributing to open-source GitHub projects will necessarily require them to write some sort of code.

They get this artificial picture in their mind that some public repository of some open-source JavaScript library or framework would be having some sort of issue or bug and they will have to fix that bug if they decide to contribute.

That’s not true (all the time).

I used to get similar picture in my mind when I was starting with contributing to open-source on GitHub.

Contributing to open source doesn’t necessarily mean writing code.

• Giving people guidelines on learning some programming language can also be considered as open-source contribution.
• Showing people path to become front-end developer can also be considered as open-source contribution.
• Well, the fact that I am writing this answer to teach what are the non-traditional way to contribute to open-source activities on GitHub can also be considered as my contribution to open-source.

Enough of talking. Let me give you an idea how you can contribute to open-source right now.

I’ll start with elaborating my personal experience on contributing to one public GitHub repository.

I am part of some developer community related forums. Many of them. One day, there was this guy who created a thread mentioning:

"I created GitHub repository with an aim to provide 999 C programs for beginners. I created 7 of them. 992 more to go."

This sounded very interesting to me. I quickly clicked on his repo link and explored 7 programs he created. They were truly beginner-friendly and aligning perfectly with his aim, to help people who are beginning in C programming.

I quickly forked his GitHub repository. Cloned that repo in my local machine. And, created one beginner-friendly C-program with solution, following the format and structure the guy followed for other 7 programs. Pushed the changes to the forked repository. Made a pull-request (PR) to that guy’s original repository with a message "added another beginner-friendly C-program with solution". That guy approved my PR request and merged changes to his master branch. Next day, I did the same with one more program.

There it goes. My open-source contribution. Yes. I needed to write code for this contribution. However, it was totally something different than what I was picturing before. I did not solve some advanced level bug or issue in some famous library or framework. I just thought about one beginner-friendly program which we learnt in university, provided solution for it and that’s it.

You can create GitHub repository on your own profile based on these ideas:

• best resources to learn front-end development (mention article links, books, video resources, free courses etc.)
• best task automation scripts in python (source scripts online and gather them at one place, give credit to original authors)
• overview of different databases (educate people on famous databases like MySQL, MongoDB, SQL Server, Oracle etc. Tell them why they should select one over another.)
• or anything you think would be educational for whole internet

If you are into ReactJS, feel free to contribute to my GitHub repository: UnnitMetaliya/99-reactjs-project-ideas

I am working on providing 99 simple project ideas which people can develop using ReactJS library. Got an idea? Great. Fork my repository. Create folder for your idea following same structure as #001 folder. Push it to repository you forked. Make a pull request to my master branch. And, that’s it.

tl;dr>> Contributing to open-source on GitHub doesn’t necessarily require to write code. There are hundreds of different ways to contribute to open-source other than writing code.