Learning through open source

The Best Way to Learn a Codebase Is to Break Someone Else's

I started sending pull requests to open-source projects in March 2026, mostly to tools I use every day. At the time of writing that’s 170 merged, across Python, C++, Rust, Go and shell. (The full list is generated from GitHub, so it can’t flatter me.) I learned more from the review threads than from the code I wrote. Most of what I learned came from maintainers telling me, politely, that I’d missed something about their project that nobody could have told me in advance. ...

April 8, 2026 · Updated September 2026 · 4 min · Muhammad Hassan Raza