How can you learn React internals, work with Facebook engineers like Dan Abramov, and give back to open source all at the same time? Work on PRs to React! In this talk I walk through how I became a React contributor and give a basic overview on what you need to know to do it.

CONTENTS

0:05 - Intro
0:30 - Hacktoberfest
0:50 - How do I start
1:27 - First PR instructions
1:37 - Read the docs
2:06 - Looking for "Good First Issue"
2:24 - Claiming my issue
2:48 - The issue
3:32 - They even tell you where
3:48 - But it doesn't exist
4:39 - React Fiber changed everything
5:10 - Spelunking 101
6:22 - Fixtures
6:36 - Fixtures are awesome
7:05 - 3hr trial and error
7:12 - First PR: perfection?
7:30 - First PR: Rookie mistakes
7:55 - First PR: Changing all the dependencies
8:26 - First PR: #FAIL
9:28 - Second PR: Perfection?
9:44 - Second PR: sh#t
10:55 - 3 days of trial and error, line by line code review
11:25 - We'll need a test for this
11:52 - Tests in React
12:09 - Jest is my favorite
12:21 - Another 2 weeks of back and forth
12:39 - MERGED
13:36 - Most importantly
13:56 - Takeaways
15:19 - Inspiration
16:52 - Joint the cool kids
17:12: Questions

RESOURCES

Issue
https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/10103

First PR
https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/11149

Second PR
https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/11168

Kent Dodd's Open Source Got course
https://egghead.io/courses/how-to-contribute-to-an-open-source-project-on-github

Repo
https://github.com/sw-yx/react-contributing

Shawn's site
https://www.swyx.io