I’ve been thinking about this lately.

Most developer learning platforms optimize for things like:

• Courses completed
• Videos watched
• Quiz scores
• Certificates earned

But none of those things necessarily make someone a better software engineer.

In the real world, software is built by:

• Reading existing code
• Fixing bugs
• Reviewing PRs
• Writing documentation
• Working with maintainers
• Contributing to projects that already have users

Yet many developers spend months (or years) consuming content without ever contributing to an open source project.

I wonder what would happen if we flipped the incentives.

What if the goal wasn’t to finish a course, but to:

• Submit your first PR
• Get a PR reviewed
• Fix an issue in a real project
• Become a contributor to an existing codebase

Would that produce more capable developers?

For maintainers here:

What was the biggest hurdle before your first meaningful open source contribution?

And for newer developers:

What’s stopping you from contributing today?