{"id":35,"date":"2017-05-08T14:56:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-08T14:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.livierickson.com\/?p=35"},"modified":"2023-08-31T21:44:38","modified_gmt":"2023-08-31T21:44:38","slug":"getting-started-with-open-source-contributions-for-vr-ar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/liverickson.com\/blog\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"Getting Started with Open Source Contributions for VR & AR"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A couple of weeks back, I saw a request on Twitter for information about how to go about starting or contributing to open source software and projects, and I wanted to share what my experience with OSS has been, and my recommendations for anyone looking to get more involved with it (especially focusing on virtual reality).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Firstly, some background on my experience with open source: I started developing virtual reality applications and prototypes using the Unity game engine. I considered them open source in that all of the source code was available on Github, I freely shared how I built things and information about what I covered, and accepted occasional pull requests when people who forked the project made a small fix or updated something. I also had several \u201copen source documentation\u201d projects, which were technical in nature but were based on tutorials and resources, rather than code, similar to a wiki. In January of this year, I joined High Fidelity, which creates an open source social VR platform by the same name, and got to learn a lot more about larger open source projects \u2014 and I got over my fear of contributing to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open source means different things to different people, but generally, it\u2019s used to describe software that makes its codebase available to be read, extended, or modified by contributors. A contributor is someone who adds value to the project through writing new code, fixing bugs, filing issues, writing documentation, and helping maintain the project and people who work on it. Often times, open source projects are sponsored or originate with a single person or company (referred to sometimes as maintainers \/ core contributors) .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contributing to, or starting your own, open source projects for the first time can feel intimidating \u2013 working in a new project or area of a codebase that someone else wrote isn\u2019t something that we all get exposure to regularly, especially if you\u2019ve spent time working independently on projects for a while. Different projects will operate in their own specific ways (e.g. not all will use GitHub to track issues; some may have restrictions on what types of fixes or features come into the main code base) but a rough outline for the steps to contributing to an OSS project are listed below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The basic steps to contributing<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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  1. Get your own copy of the source code. If the project is hosted on GitHub, this generally means clicking the \u2018Fork\u2019 button, which creates a copy of the entire project to your own account that you can work from. If you need a primer on git, I recommend the interactive tutorial available from GitHub.<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Create a branch<\/em> of the project from the master branch in your fork. This is the name that you\u2019ll give the copy of your code with a specific set of changes that you\u2019re going to make. The master branch is generally the \u2018base truth\u2019 of the code that makes up an application, so you\u2019ll usually want to work from that branch, especially if you\u2019re just starting out.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Make your code changes! Maybe you found a spelling error and you\u2019ve just made a couple of characters different. That\u2019s a totally valid change, and string fixes also get downgraded in projects as lower-priority fixes. Commit your changes to your branch and push it up to your remote copy on GitHub.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Ensure that you are following any contributing or code styling guidelines before you submit a pull request. Many projects have configuration files that will define this, or will run a style-check automatically. A pull request is a way to show that you want your changes to be considered in the code base. Usually, you have a conversation about your code and may be asked to make changes by the core maintainers of the repository.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    I recommend picking a project that you work with on a regular basis, whether it\u2019s a framework you use in your applications or a plugin that you use in your games. Understanding how the components work together and having a solid concept of what the goals are for the project you want to contribute to are important to being able to collaborate with the core team. Being a passionate user means that you\u2019re already a member of the community \u2013 you can think of contributing formally as a way of adding to something you use and like to make it even better!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Some of the things that I recommend new contributors to an OSS project look for:<\/p>\n\n\n\n