In this blog post, I will show that contributing to Go language repositories is as simple as contributing to any other open-source repo. This will be a step-by-step guide on how to contribute to Go language repositories. For the example, I will use the main Go repo go.googlesource.com/go.

I work simultaneously on different companies’ projects, open-source projects, and personal projects. I should therefore use the same username but distinct email addresses for each of them. Although we can set a git config user.email <email@example.com> for each project repository, this might be a tedious manual task and perhaps unsuitable.

The Git config manual describes the use of configuration files to better manage such a task through “Conditional includes”.

Situation

On an interview people judge developers by their GitHub. Recently, I saw the tweet with picture showing GitHub contribution with one commit activity and the caption:

“Please don’t apply for a Senior dev position if your GitHub looks like this…”

Like in typical repo this blog has first git commit:

$ git commit --allow-empty --message "Initial commit"