Ask HN: What are some open source projects that a beginner can work on?

http://www.openhatch.com A website for ongoing opensource projects in python.

I find Mercurial very easy to work with. You just need to know some 2.x Python.

Here's the repo:

http://selenic.com/hg

And here's their list of easy bugs:

http://bz.selenic.com/buglist.cgi?keywords=easy&list_id=5790

Contributor guidlines:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ContributingChanges

If you're interested, I could mentor you through some of it.

Edit: Oh, and this appears to be our April Fool's Prank:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtAuQXeQrMQ

I strongly recommend trying to contribute to a project that you personally use. Once you've been using it for awhile, you'll be better equipped to make changes to it + you'll maybe find bugs that you can fix. While you're doing this, mark yourself as a watcher of the project on Github, that way you can see bug reports come in and maybe fix them.

You can try to contribute to just any project someone here suggests, but I find it hard to get motivated + be skilled enough in that language/project to just start contributing. Can you talk about your current skills and what kind of languages/libraries you're using now, or are interested in learning?