Ask HN: Good open source projects for beginners? (early 2018) | Hacker News Reader

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

6 pointsMikeTheGreat5 comments

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).

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.

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/

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.

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

https://github.com/reactjs/redux

If you are student check out Google Summer of Code 2018

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