Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?
#12What do you use regularly, that is open source? You'll be more motivated to participate in projects that you use on a regular basis, that might be useful to you.
Find some software that you're interested in. Do you follow their GitHub account, subscribe to the mailing list (especially dev list), keep up to date on changes that are new? Have you looked at their source? Is there anything you wish the software did better, or any bugs you wish were fixed?
Learning how everything fits together for a software project can be a great learning experience, and if you take notes as you go, you'll naturally write docs (and be the hero of the day).
Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?
#13The best way to do it is just look at what packages you use frequently. If their github repo is accessible then dive into the "issues" and start opening some PRs to address them. And if you've ever wished the package did X then propose it and open a PR to see if the maintainers are interested in adding it
Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?
#14You can contribute to my project, https://github.com/WikiEducationFoundation/WikiEduDashboard
It's a Rails/React app for professors to run Wikipedia assignments, where instead of writing term papers, the students improve Wikipedia articles.
I'd love to have help from experienced devs -- especially someone to help me get started migrating to Redux.
Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?
#15
https://github.com/yoonic
My open-source e-commerce platform all in Javascript. Backend is an API powered by Hapi.js (node.js) and Storefront is a React isomorphic app.
Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?
#16https://openhatch.org/ Is an nonprofit dedicated towards helping people find and get involved in open source software
Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?
#17The most important thing is to find a project that has the bandwidth to process your contributions. If you see dangling pull requests or patches that have never been reviewed, move along. Even if a project passes this smell test, the only way to be sure that it has maintainers willing to devote some measure of time to providing feedback on your work is to submit one or two small fixes and see how they fare.
Agreed. Have your work ignored is a huge let down
Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?
#18My suggestion is to convince your company (or if you own the company, simply take action) to use a particular open source software package. As soon as you run into a feature you need but the package does not offer, take some time to develop on top of it (on company time or at home) instead of writing your own hacky in-house solution, using a more careful development process than your company's software. Develop it until it is used in production, and donate the feature to the project. This way, if it is not wanted or ignored, it will still benefit you or your company.
Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?
#19Usually find something you use. OSS projects love small/scoped fixes. There are a ton of underlooked at sections of larger projects like docs, minor optimizations,..
If you can, try to look at how the project communicates with the community (mailing list, irc, gitter,slack,..) and just ask the community where the pain points are if you can't find any open issues.
Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?
#20You could write a project-finding app using JS and Ruby/Elixir/JS for the backend
I'm thinking of scraping GitHub, Bitbucket, HackerOne, etc for metrics that correspond to projects that a) need help and b) need the kind of help you'd want to give.
This is the problem you're staring at right now, so you're already interested in solving it.