Students Guide to OpenSauced
Introduction to OpenSauced for Students
Welcome to the wonderful world of open source. As a student, you'll find countless opportunities to contribute to projects, collaborate across global projects, and enhance your resume through meaningful contributions. You can use OpenSauced as a tool to enhance your open source journey by helping you to find interesting repositories that match your academic and personal interests, document your journey, learn from the community, and showcase your growth.
In this guide, you will learn how to use OpenSauced features like your personal Dev Card, Highlights, Contributor Insights, and Repository Insights to showcase your open source work and build connections to help you meet your next goals.
Getting Started
To get started, you will need to create an account on OpenSauced. You can do this by visiting app.opensauced.pizza and clicking the "Connect with GitHub" button. You will be prompted to sign in with your GitHub account. Once you have signed in, you will be redirected to the OpenSauced dashboard. The best place to get started is by creating your profile.
Creating Your Profile
Creating your profile is a great way to showcase your open source contributions, connect with other contributors and maintainers, and share with your classmates, communities, and connections. Here are some steps to help you get started:
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After creating your account, navigate to "Settings."
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Once there, you will be asked to add your name, bio, links to your social media accounts, timezone, and other forms of contact information.
tipDon't forget to add your personal site, GitHub Sponsors URL, and LinkedIn so people can connect with you and learn more about your work.
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In the "Interests" section, select the various programming languages and topics you are interested in. Setting them up helps us recommend open source projects that fit your interests.
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Manage your email preferences.
Your Profile
Your profile is a great resource for showcasing your contributions and sharing your open source work with others.
On your profile, you will see the "Highlights" tab, which you can learn more about in this section. Other tabs you may find useful on your profile are:
- Contributions: This tab includes a graph showing the number of PRs you have opened, the velocity of your PRs, and the number of repositories you have contributed to in the last thirty days. Underneath the graph is a "Latest PRs" chart, which shows a list of current and recent PRs. This tab is helpful if you want to showcase a steady and consistent open source contribution experience.
- Recommendations: This tab includes a list of open source projects that are chosen based on the programming languages you picked in the "Interests" section of your public profile. It is useful if you're looking for new projects to contribute to.
To get the full benefit of your profile, share it on social media, include a link to it on your resume, LinkedIn, your GitHub Readme, and your personal website to showcase your most up-to-date open source contributions.
Your Dev Card
Another fun way to share your open source contributions is through your Dev Card. Your Dev Card is a visual representation of your open source contributions. It includes your profile picture, name, bio, and the number of your latest contributions.
Explore: Finding Your Next Open Source Project
The "Explore" tab is a great place to start if you're looking for a new open source project to contribute to. Here, you can find a list of open source projects and filter them by language, top repos, recent, most active, and more.
Once you've selected your filters, you'll be able to see the contributors, spam, and activity levels of the repository. Understanding a repository's activity level and PR velocity can help you determine if it's a good fit for you to contribute to and what to expect when you submit a PR.
For example, if you wanted to look for a JavaScript project to contribute to, you would select "JavaScript" from the language dropdown and "Most Active" from the filter dropdown to see the most active JavaScript projects on GitHub. If you want to keep track of the repositories you're interested in contributing to, you can select and add them to a Repository Insights Page or your Workspace.
Highlights: Connecting and Recognizing Contributions
Leveraging OpenSauced's Highlights feature is a great way to showcase your valuable contributions to open source projects. You can curate and share your achievements and milestones, bringing visibility to your hard work.
The Highlights feature allows you to:
- talk about issues that you raised,
- share Dev.to blog posts that you've written,
- display Pull Requests that showcase your contributions.
Creating a New Highlight
There are two ways to create a new highlight:
- Paste the URL to your PR, issue, or Dev.to blog post (shown in blue below).
- Choose from a list of suggestions (shown in orange below).
If you're adding a blog post, you'll need to associate it to a repository by clicking the "Add a repo" button.
Finally, it's time to add the details of your highlight. You can write the description yourself or use the auto-summarize button to generate one.
Writing an Effective Highlight
Sharing the story of your hard work is an opportunity to connect with the reader, which could include potential collaborators, other contributors, maintainers, or anyone on OpenSauced. Here are some tips to help you write effective stories for your highlights:
Highlighting Issues
- Share your motivation: Briefly explain why you raised the issue. For example, "I'm passionate about improving accessibility because I believe everyone should have equal access to information."
- Summarize the issue: Briefly describe the issue you wrote so your readers have context. For example, "I raised an issue to add alt text to images in the project's 'About Us' page."
- Describe the impact: Briefly state how the resolution of the issue will improve the project. For example, "This will help people who use screen readers understand the content better."
Highlighting PRs
- Describe the PR: Start with a clear summary of what your PR accomplishes. For example, "I added a new feature to the project's Chrome Extension that allows users to summarize content."
- Highlight your solution and its impact: Briefly describe the solution, any challenges you faced, or any part of the PR you're particularly proud of. For example, "Initially, I faced challenges with the API, but I was able to resolve them using a different endpoint."
- Reflect on your experience: Mention what you learned from working on the PR. For example, "I learned a lot about the Chrome Extension API and how to use it to create new features."
Highlighting Dev.to Blog Posts
- Describe the topic: Begin with an interesting blog post summary to help others understand your writing.
- Discuss the inspiration: Explain why you wrote this blog post. Is it to guide others on improving their coding skills, raise awareness about an issue in the tech community, or display your progress in learning a new programming language?
- End with a call-to-action: Encourage others to read and engage with the post.
Creating Your Workspace
As a student working on multiple projects or contributing to various open source repositories, keeping track of progress, goals, and collaboration can be daunting. To keep track of the repositories that are most important to you or repositories that you're working on with a team, OpenSauced Workspaces can be your go-to tool for organizing and understanding your open source journey.
Your Workspace helps you to:
- Understand projects at a high level: Being able to look at all the repositories that are important to you and understand them at a high level makes it easier for you to share this information and collaborate with others.
- Enhance team collaboration: If you're working with a group, you can keep track of what everyone is working on. This transparency is key to teamwork and support, whether you're setting goals for a class project, contributing to a group assignment, or working together for accountability.
- Deepen your project insight: Understanding the underlying activities of the projects you're tracking helps you to understand their progress, health, and the community of student contributors you're part of.
- Celebrate and communicate your achievements: When it's time to talk about your experience, having analytics on the projects you worked on allows you to showcase your contributions, acknowledge the efforts of your peers, and clearly communicate the hard work invested.
Workspaces offer a centralized platform. It's perfect for students to organize, track, and analyze the open source projects they're working on.
Creating a New Workspace
To create a workspace, start by accessing the Workspace switcher in the sidebar. From there, you can create a new workspace or view an existing one.
Whenever you select "Home", you'll be taken to the last workspace you opened.
Adding Repositories to Your Workspace
If you're creating a new workspace, you'll have the option to add repositories at the time of creation.
Start by creating a workspace name, then click "Add repositories". You'll have three options for adding repositories:
- Search for Repositories: Use our search tool by adding an organization name, followed by the repository name, and add them to your workspace.
- Import a GitHub Organization: Connect to your GitHub organizations to create a workspace from an organization. (If you're having trouble with this, see the "Sync Your GitHub Team" section in our FAQs.)
- Import Repositories: Paste a list of repositories to add to your workspace.
Once your repositories are added, you'll be able to see them in your repository dashboard. You can also edit your workspace to add or remove repositories anytime.