Hello :) I've recently made several contributions to `react-native-video`, even making it into the top 100 contributors list, and I was in the same position as you—never having contributed to open source before. Here's a repeatable approach I found helpful:

### Find a Feature You Need 🎯

I recommend you start with a feature you personally need. For me, it was the ability to handle `webvtt` subtitles in mobile video players for overlaying data. I say this because, before I had contributed, it just seemed like there was SO much that could be done. Do I start with a bug? Oh, okay look, an issue for "first time contributors, thats me!; omg I have no idea whats going on?!". \
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Narrowing it down to a feature that I needed gave me both clarity and the motivation to get it done.

### Engage with the Community 💬

Check if the project has a community platform like Discord or Slack. I found valuable guidance on Slack for `react-native-video`. They also might have a twitter/github discussions/reddit. Point is, they will likely have some method of communication, find it, and then join the party 🎉!

### Dive into Contribution Guidelines 📄

Refer to the project's `contributions.md` for an overview of contribution expectations and how to get started. This can be hit or miss; but, its a good starting point.

### Set Up Your Development Environment 🛠️

1\. **Fork and Clone**: Fork the project and clone it to create an isolated environment. I personally did it like this because it just felt like too much, there was so much going on so I needed a way to remove some of the noise and drill down to what I wanted to change.

2\. **Experiment**: Start with small changes in your forked copy, ensuring changes affect your project. For example, you just look at a class initializer that you *know* is going to fire and do a print statement. This helped me to learn how dependencies are built, pointed to, and managed overall.

3\. **Understand the Basics**: Grasp the basic structure and coding patterns of the project. In my case, I needed to understand the flow from react native -&gt; native; so, I just tried to make the absolute most basic function that would be called in react native and do something on the native side.

### Learn by Doing 📚

Build a simple version of the feature in a standalone project. For example, I created minimal video players in Swift and Java to understand how they integrate with React Native. Depending on your feature, this could be quite intense method; but, I think the goal is just to get a sense of how does this thing work under the hood? Like, if this library didn't exist, how would I even do this?

### Implement the Feature ✨

Figure out how to add your feature in the standalone project before applying it to the actual project. I did it this way because I wanted to have a reference point. Essentially, okay, here is a project where I *know* the feature is working as intended and now I just need to get it in this project but following their abstractions. So for example, they might have a way they do their events, like okay all events go here. So just slap yours in there and follow their patterns go with their style and I think it'll smooth things out.

### Follow Contribution Protocols 📝

1\. **Communication**: Engage with maintainers if unsure about procedures. I was able to get valuable feedback and even highlight some bugs as I went through the project. Normally you might have to dig to find who the active maintainers are if it isn't explicitly stated somewhere.

2\. **Observation**: Look at successful PRs for guidance on branch management, commit history, and PR structure. My thought process was, okay these PRs get merged, if I just copy *how* they did it, I can find success too.

3\. **Documentation**: Include a detailed PR with a summary, explanations, and visual proofs(screen shots/video).

### Final Touches 🛁

1\. **Linting**: Ensure your code meets project standards by running provided linter scripts.

2\. **Await Review**: Be prepared for feedback and possible revisions. For this, I would refer to [Alex guide on communication](https://www.jointaro.com/course/effective-communication-for-engineers/). I had some healthy back and forth before I was able to get my features merged.

### Note on Rejection and Feature Requests 🚫

Your PR might not always align with the project's direction. Consider starting with a feature request issue, indicating your interest in implementing it.

You can take a look at the PR I made [here](https://github.com/react-native-video/react-native-video/pull/3541)\
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Hope this helps!

Mid-Level Software Engineer at Startup Company

coofzilla

Software engineers can have impact in many ways outside of coding, but make no mistake: Writing tons of very high-quality code quickly will always be useful. Follow the resources here to learn how to become a "code machine".