Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?

#1

Post by coffeeski » Wed, May 03, 2017, 9:10 PM UTC

I'm a Senior Dev and got a fire lit under my butt after going to the Rails Conf 2017 in Phoenix. I would like to contribute to a Ruby or Javascript project, but I don't know what, or where I can find them...

How do I find a open source project that needs some maintainers or things fixed? I am open to writing Ruby, Javascript or Elixir. I'm also open to writing documentation

Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?

#2

Post by cannotsay2017 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 9:12 PM UTC

Check out this link - http://bfy.tw/Ba64

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?

#3

Post by coffeeski » Wed, May 03, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

cannotsay2017 wrote: post #2

Check out this link - http://bfy.tw/Ba64 Good luck!

Thats a jerk answer. Of course theres google and I have been googling

Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?

#4

Post by based2 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 9:17 PM UTC

https://helpwanted.apache.org/

http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html

http://savannah.gnu.org/people/?group=tasklist

https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/?SetFreedomCookie

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38881/how-to-find-opensou...

https://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/07/04/195239/Finding-Open-...

Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?

#5

Post by squiguy7 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 9:17 PM UTC

You can try to look under GitHub's trending page for those languages (e.g. https://github.com/trending/ruby).

Also I like to check out tools that I use daily and see if there are issues I can tackle. You can follow mailing lists, public slack channels, etc. too.

Just talking to others will give you ideas to get started. And if you can't find anything quickly, start your own and have fun with it!

Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?

#6

Post by rukenshia » Wed, May 03, 2017, 9:19 PM UTC

You could try contributing to gitlab.com, I didn't know any Ruby when I started contributing but they have an awesome guideline and issue tags that show you what's easy to do for you. You get high quality code reviews and they help you a lot when you struggle.

Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?

#7

Post by aw3c2 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 9:20 PM UTC

Any project needs help. Pick a hobby of yours and browse the web to find appropriate projects in your languages. I would say that is the best way to find work that is fun for you.

Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?

#8

Post by vertebrate » Wed, May 03, 2017, 9:22 PM UTC

https://openhatch.org/

https://www.codetriage.com/

Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?

#9

Post by danso » Wed, May 03, 2017, 9:23 PM UTC

Is there a gem or library that you use? One that isn't too massively complex? Then start with that. My first open source contributions were adding features to libraries that were useful to me, so even if I got slapped down, I still came out ahead in terms of productivity.

Another reason to pick a library you actually use is because you will go into it with additional curiosity and expectations. I'm always a bit thrilled to find out that a library which I can't even begin to imagine being clever or thoughtful enough to design is indeed much smarter than I imagined, or, is actually kept together with duct tape. The latter situation has actually helped me overcome productivity declines that come from obsessing in vain over whether I've got the details down right. I just need to remind myself that a much more useful and popular library that I depend on has apparently flaws that end up not impeding development or public usage.

Re: Ask HN: How do I find an open source project to contribute to?

#10

Post by mwenge » Wed, May 03, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

The 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.