I Got My First Open Source PR Merged After 7 Rejections. Here's What I Learned About Contributing.

My first 7 open source pull requests were all closed without merging. Two were ignored entirely. Three got "thanks, but we're not going in this direction." Two had 20+ review comments that I never addressed because I felt overwhelmed. My 8th PR was merged into a project with 15K stars. Then my 9th, 10th, and 11th. Once I understood the unwritten rules, everything clicked. Here's everything I wish I'd known. Why Your First PRs Get Rejected Reason 1: You're Solving a Problem Nobody Has My first PR added "dark mode support" to a CLI tool. The maintainer's response: "We've discussed this before and decided against it — it adds maintenance burden for a feature few users want. See issue #234." The fix: Before writing code, check: Is there an open issue for this? (If yes, comment "I'd like to work on this" before starting) Has this been proposed and rejected before? (Search closed issues) Does the maintainer want this? (Ask in an issue first for non-trivial changes) The best first contributio