First Steps in Contributing to MariaDB

At MariaDB Day in February in Brussels, VP Engineering Vicențiu Ciurbaru delivered an inspiring presentation titled “Launch Your Open Source Career: First Steps in Contributing to MariaDB.”

In the spirit of the recent positive stats on new contributions to MariaDB, let me recap Vicentiu’s tips for anyone looking to make their first contribution.

Contributing to MariaDB is not only about writing code—it’s about joining a vibrant community where every contribution, big or small, drives innovation. We hope newcomers can see a tangible path to getting involved.

How to start contributing?

The simplest way to start, is to help with documentation or answering questions on Stackoverflow, Reddit, and similar sites.

The documentation at the MariaDB Knowledge Base is a wiki. Go to https://mariadb.com/kb/en/ and sign up and you will get access to the Edit button. Contributions are reviewed and possibly edited.

How to contribute code?

The easiest way to contribute code is to submit patches to the Github repository at https://github.com/MariaDB/server. Github has good instructions on how to fork and submit your patch AS a pull request.

The steps for contributing are explained in more detail in Vicențiu’s slides and recording:

Fetching the code
Compiling it
Testing it
Writing a patch
Submitting a pull request
Making sure tests pass buildbot

Vicențiu also shares several tips & tricks on contributing code. An important part is making sure you understand the problem you are trying to solve, and discussing what you are trying to accomplish before putting a lot of time on it. The places to start are MariaDB’s Jira issue tracker, or the MariaDB’s Zulip chat.

Where to begin?

If you are pondering where to find something to work on, take a look at Jira issues labeled Beginner friendly, or consider Google Summer of Code, the MariaDB Jupyter kernel, or AI Framework Integrations.

Nitty gritty tips

Vicențiu also shared several best practices on using Github, and reminded about delivering code with the right licensing – take a look at the FAQ for the MariaDB Contributor Agreement.

And then?

Hope this recap sparked your interest to contribute! For Vicențiu’s full presentation see Launch Your Open Source Career: First Steps in Contributing to MariaDB on Youtube (24:10).