For people who want to work in a tech field such as software development/engineering or devops/operations/system engineering, there can be huge benefits to contributing to open source projects. At the same time, the culture around open source can be opaque and difficult to parse for outsiders, particularly those who are minorities in the broader culture or who feel that they do not match their own mental model of “contributor to open source”. I will talk about some of the advice I’ve been given about contributing to open source and how it matches up to what I’ve seen as a contributor.