Getting Started with Contributing to PMM as a beginner

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)
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Hi, I’m Balaji, a pre final year student interested in contributing to open source. I m particularly interested in databases and backend systems mainly using Go and Python.

When I look at the issues page, many of the issues dont make sense to me yet. How can I start with simpler tasks, gradually understand the codebase, and move toward contributing more meaningful work? Any recommendations or guidance would be appreciated.

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Hey, thanks a lot for your interest and eagerness to learn. It’s great to see your enthusiasm!

To get started with PMM, I’d recommend first going through the documentation and setting up a local instance. This will help you understand how the product works end-to-end. If you’ve already managed to monitor MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB using PMM, that’s more than enough to get a good feel for the system in action.

We also have a very detailed contribution guide that walks you through setting up a local development environment step by step:
https://github.com/percona/pmm/blob/v3/CONTRIBUTING.md

To help you take your first steps, we’ve already tagged some good first issues that are beginner-friendly:
https://github.com/percona/pmm/issues?q=is%3Aopen%20is%3Aissue%20label%3A%22good%20first%20issue%22

Once your local environment is ready, feel free to pick up an issue from this list and work on it. Another great way to contribute is by looking at issues reported by the community, try reproducing one locally, and if you’re able to identify a fix, you can submit a PR for the team to review.

I’ll also check internally if we have a few small, first-time-friendly tickets in Jira that we can open up for beginners to work on.

Thanks again, and looking forward to your contributions! :rocket:

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