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Open source is more fun with friends. If you don't have the time or energy to contribute yourself, I have a way for you to live vicariously: sponsor me on GitHub and I'll send you updates about what I'm working on. I'll also take feedback on what *you* think I should work on.

For Black Friday, I'm readjusting my GitHub sponsor goals. Instead of targeting specific dollar amounts, I've changed my goal to 10 monthly sponsors (any dollar amount). github.com/sponsors/coo...

If you contribute any dollar amount on any cadence, I'll be happy to add you to a private, bi-weekly newsletter about what I'm up to in open source (entirely opt-in).

I do about 5-10 hours per week of open source work on my own time. These days, I'm doing work in the MobX ecosystem, trying to prepare for us React Compiler compatibility. But when I want a break from that, I dig through React Native community repos and pitch in wherever I can.

How did you get into contributing to open source projects? I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say it’s hard to figure out where to contribute. And even when an opportunity seems promising, it’s tough to know if my contribution is even needed or part of the vision of the project.

First you can peruse the issue boards. Just start answering common questions that you see recurring in a project you're interested in. Helping facilitate the movement or categorizing of issues for maintainers is super helpful.

This is very helpful, thank you! I guess I didn’t realize this was stuff that I could actually do as a member of the community and not affiliated with the project.

Yeah the answering questions bit is huge for maintainers. That and helping people make reproducible examples of bugs (or otherwise reproducing/not reproducing) is mega helpful and we absolutely remember who does it.

Also as a maintainer, lots of times I learn stuff from the MST users who answer issues. Since I don’t write the original codebase, I have a ton of gaps in my mental model.