Ask HN: Good open source projects for beginners? (early 2018)

#1

Post by MikeTheGreat » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 3:26 AM UTC

What are some good open source projects for beginners here in early 2018? Ideally I'd love pointers to projects that have a culture of nurturing new programmers - people who have had a couple quarters/semesters of programming at the college level, but are otherwise just getting started.

(I saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9305398 - the general advice in it is great; I was hoping to get an updated list for here in February 2018.)(Personally, I'd love to find smaller projects - it seems like a bunch of the projects listed in the earlier post are big things, such as Mozilla, Mercurial, Ruby)

(Side-question: I think this is a reasonable 'AskHN' topic, but if it's not I'd be happy to revise it and/or take it down).

Re: Ask HN: Good open source projects for beginners? (early 2018)

#2

Post by xuhang57 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:14 AM UTC

If you are interested in JavaScript, Redux is a great library you can start to study the source code.

https://github.com/reactjs/redux

Re: Ask HN: Good open source projects for beginners? (early 2018)

#3

Post by rhoursour » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:21 AM UTC

You would do well to take a look at the well-written open source guide written by the folks at Github: https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/#finding-a-projec...

One of the links featured there is a website tracking resources to find projects for people who have never contributed to open source before: http://www.firsttimersonly.com/

Re: Ask HN: Good open source projects for beginners? (early 2018)

#4

Post by fundamental » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:22 AM UTC

A good open source project is one that matches your existing skills and the skills that you want to build.

My own FLOSS efforts mostly revolve around the Linux audio community (mostly musical software). There's plenty of projects from the very small to mid-large size. My focus is primarily on ZynAddSubFX (https://github.com/zynaddsubfx/ ) and the project is looking for new contributors. Depending upon an individual's interests and goals of contributing to FLOSS I may be able to direct them to other similar projects.

Re: Ask HN: Good open source projects for beginners? (early 2018)

#5

Post by mathieubordere » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 8:54 AM UTC

https://whatcanidoformozilla.org/

I have a good experience contributing to the Rust programming language. Rust e.g. has open issues on Github that are labeled 'E-mentor', when you decide to tackle such an issue, you will be mentored by an experienced Rust contributor.

The Rust community is generally very friendly and welcoming.

Re: Ask HN: Good open source projects for beginners? (early 2018)

#6

Post by stealthcat » Sat, Mar 03, 2018, 3:32 AM UTC

If you are student check out Google Summer of Code 2018