FreeBSD has a kind, international team of developers. It may be a scary project to contribute to for beginners to open source because it is an operating system, and people have some apprehension about improving operating systems.
Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
171–180 of 293 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
#172I've contributed to a few Python projects, and the experience I had with the IPython and beets groups both stand out in my mind as very friendly. The patch I contributed to IPython was vanishingly trivial. It removed an unnecessary function call in a code path that wasn't even performance-sensitive (I just stumbled on it when looking into a more complex issue). I would have understood if the patch just lingered without being looked at for ages. It didn't address an existing issue, didn't impact the correctness of the code, and barely had any consequence to performance. But, it was quickly reviewed and accepted and the maintainers were thankful to have my contribution. I was very pleasantly surprised, and will certainly consider contributing to their project again when I have time. Likewise, I ran into a bug in the beets MP3 tagging/collection manager and was able to report the issue, discuss it with the author and other contributors to determine the preferred way to handle the situation, create a new unit test and fix, and get it accepted all within a couple of days. Everyone I spoke with was very inviting and helpful. I hope to be able to help them again in the future as well!
Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
#173The JuliaOpt / JuMP (Julia for Mathematical Programming) team has been responsive and supportive. When I file a Github issue at a random hour, they respond in minutes. The quality of code and testing is outstanding, and frankly for a project started in academia that's rare. In the dynamic world of pre-1.0 Julia, they've set the standard for 3rd party libraries, accommodated deprecations from the language immediately as versions change, and overall driven the advancement of scientific computing.
https://github.com/juliaopt/jump.jl
Edit: Here's a great example of the JuMP team debugging somebody's particular script, running it, and benchmarking it - all because somebody filed a Github issue. https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl/issues/614
Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just be careful if you don't share their political views. They just might go digging through everything you've ever said and every cause you've ever donated to and start a witch hunt. Even if you invented Javascript.
A litmus test of a great community is how they deal with people who are technically useful but socially reprehensible.
Curious what you think the response should be.
Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
#175Rust is generally awesome.
Rust's IRC channel is amazing - supportive, thoughtful, and non-condescending. This is in sharp contrast to the Go one, which is an absolute cesspit.
Thankfully (but still unfortunately), the Go community Slack does a great job of replacing the IRC channel with more civilized/productive discussion.
The IRC channel, like many, is often not a friendly place.
Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
#176It's a smaller project, but I've made small contributions to PyInstaller and found the lead people to be very agreeable.
Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
#177Epic's Unreal Engine 4 team and the community around it is an amazing kind, supportive, friendly and talented group of people. http://unrealengine.com/ Its one of the reasons I got back into game dev and chose to use this engine. The engine itself is state-of-the-art and the improvements per each release is AWESOME. As the engine is a commercial offering that is open source, there are a lot of people involved. This m…
Is Unreal Engine really open source? Doesn't look like it to me. https://www.unrealengine.com/eula
Yes it is open source, but not libre / free. i.e: not GPL / BSD / MIT style etc...
If you want to view and modify the code you can.
So it is open in that sense.
Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just be careful if you don't share their political views. They just might go digging through everything you've ever said and every cause you've ever donated to and start a witch hunt. Even if you invented Javascript.
A litmus test of a great community is how they deal with people who are technically useful but socially reprehensible.
Making a political donation toward a popular opinion (7 million people agreed with Eich) means that you are socially reprehensible?
I disagree with him, but I would not let a dissenting opinion on a single controversial political subject lead me to conclude that a person is "reprehensible" in any way.
Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
#179I've always found the Haskell community very helpful and willing to go to great lengths to explain complicated concepts to newcomers.
I would definitely second this. I have never contributed to a Haskell project, so didn't mention it in my main reply, but I was nothing short of astonished and humbled by my experience with the Haskell community when I was learning it. I've never encountered any other community that was so welcoming and willing to bend over backwards for newbies. I honestly felt a little bit bad. I grew up online, and I consider myself skilled at integrating with established communities, being polite and reserved and not expecting to be accorded unearned respect and the like. But after just asking a couple questions in the Haskell IRC channel, I found people willing to have extended in-depth discussions with me even though I was a total unknown. I didn't feel deserving of such an investment of their time and I have never come across it before or since. I consider the Python community to be excellent in my experience, but Haskell is truly god-level tier. They changed what I even thought was possible for a programming language community.
Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
#180Visit https://openhatch.org/ -- they exist to match people with good open source projects. Good luck!
FWIW, I've tried to find interesting things through this page a few times and have utterly failed. Maybe I'm missing something, but the search feature is a bad aggregator of issue trackers, without useful filtering or pre-selection.