Ask HN: Beginner looking to join an open source project

1 pointmpg333 comments

What are some good websites/information to help me get started?

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Some general stuff:

http://producingoss.com/

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

http://www.reddit.com/r/FOSSHelpWanted

http://sourceforge.net/people/

http://www.reddit.com/r/codeprojects

Outside of that, you'll want to know one or more of the popular Version Control Systems. Git is wildly popular these days, and subversion has a huge legacy base of projects using it. If you learned Git and SVN you'd be in good shape. But hg (Mercurial) and a handful of others are pretty popular as well.

For a good intro to Git and OSS projects, see:

http://codebetter.com/karlseguin/2010/04/22/contributing-to-...

Do you already code in one or more languages, or are you just now learning coding as well?

Thanks! I know some Java, VB.NET....but looking to build on this and expand to other languages.

Awesome. What kind of stuff are you interested, in a general sense?

If you have any interest in learning Groovy and hacking some stuff that deals with the intersection of social-networking and information-retrieval, feel free to drop me a line... I run a project that could use some help.

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