Code Combat (YC W14) is a game that teaches people to program. It's been entirely open sourced and the devs/community make it extremely simple for new comers to contribute. I strongly recommend you check them out!
Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors
#12It's a pity you don't teach C++, the LibreOffice team are amazing!
Re: Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors
#13I'm terrible at open source because I usually fix things that don't need to be fixed (aka refactor). Then people yell at me to go away.
You're dealing with terrible project maintainers then. Refactoring is super, super important and any project that rejects it must have a strange codebase. Either that or the project owners/maintainers have a lot of pride.
Or the refactor doesn't make sense...
Re: Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors
#14I'm terrible at open source because I usually fix things that don't need to be fixed (aka refactor). Then people yell at me to go away.
You're dealing with terrible project maintainers then. Refactoring is super, super important and any project that rejects it must have a strange codebase. Either that or the project owners/maintainers have a lot of pride.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Dec-31.html - "Open Source Contribution Etiquette"
Re: Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're dealing with terrible project maintainers then. Refactoring is super, super important and any project that rejects it must have a strange codebase. Either that or the project owners/maintainers have a lot of pride.
That strikes me as a bit of an odd stance to take. While refactoring is certainly a portion of the work done to most any project, I wouldn't think that refactoring would be attractive as a first commit for someone who may be viewed as an outsider to a project. Even if you overlook that getting code that matches a projects style guides might be rarer than it should be refactoring (at least in most cases that I need to…
From experience, I get really excited receiving small refactoring changes from newcomers, usually with the message "Hey this is my first time contributing to an open source project!"
I guess "small" is key. I agree a large refactoring would be troublesome to verify.
Re: Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors
#16Any of the KDE Community projects. http://community.kde.org/Getinvolved
Re: Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're dealing with terrible project maintainers then. Refactoring is super, super important and any project that rejects it must have a strange codebase. Either that or the project owners/maintainers have a lot of pride.
That strikes me as a bit of an odd stance to take. While refactoring is certainly a portion of the work done to most any project, I wouldn't think that refactoring would be attractive as a first commit for someone who may be viewed as an outsider to a project. Even if you overlook that getting code that matches a projects style guides might be rarer than it should be refactoring (at least in most cases that I need to…
What does make a good first commit? I ask because I'm just starting to try to work on open source. The first commit I made on the one project I've already started getting involved with was adding more content (especially where there was a "TODO: more of this" comment), and correcting spellings. I wouldn't know how to start on something less content-based, though.
Re: Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors
#18OpenHatch tries to solve this problem - help people find a good project, and in general, make it easier for new people to get into OSS.
Re: Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors
#19What about contributing to writing docs instead? yes i'm serious. When it comes to writing documentation for opensource projects, suddenly,there is no developper available. Yet documentation is central to any opensource project.
Maybe I should launch a "Please write help us write docs" plateform.
Re: Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
That strikes me as a bit of an odd stance to take. While refactoring is certainly a portion of the work done to most any project, I wouldn't think that refactoring would be attractive as a first commit for someone who may be viewed as an outsider to a project. Even if you overlook that getting code that matches a projects style guides might be rarer than it should be refactoring (at least in most cases that I need to…
What does make a good first commit? I ask because I'm just starting to try to work on open source. The first commit I made on the one project I've already started getting involved with was adding more content (especially where there was a "TODO: more of this" comment), and correcting spellings. I wouldn't know how to start on something less content-based, though.
I'd say bug fixes, tiny typo fixes, documentation additions, unit test additions, performance enhancements, and relatively minor features are all good candidates. The actual scope of any set of changes that will be quickly accepted can vary wildly depending upon how well defined the project is and what group of individuals is maintaining it. I'd say the defining characteristics would just be easy to read the diff and understand how things are exactly altered and that the benefits are proportional to the risk and time for integration. An adequately written documentation addition for instance would be a easy to check for consistency and structure in one pass and the benefit is generally obvious after reading the diff. Large changes for a first commit can be reasonable, but some extra time has to be expected with some discussion on those changesets.