Ask HN: Anyone looking for contributors for their open source projects | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone looking for contributors for their open source projects

51 pointsmr_o4749 comments

I am primarily looking to contribute to python software projects to further improve my skillset

You can search github for labels like “needs-help” or “good-first-issue” etc. Many many projects would love help, but aren’t asking for it. Example query: https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Anee...

My recommendation tho of course is to find an existing project you’re passionate about, find their tracker, and dig in! Few softwares are ever truly done. Make one you love even better.

Link gives a 404

github search is not available if you're not logged in to the site... works after login.

seems rather hostile. any idea what's the rationale behind it?

Microsoft wants users to move away from GitHub to other alternatives.

1) Vendor lock-in 2) GH search is resource hungry, there are older HN posts discussing this

That is how you end up never contributing anything or having your first pull request be rejected.

The random driveby contributor strategy has never worked for me. Most of my projects had me as their "long term" contributor or the opposite, I let one of my contributors become one.

Organization is critical to the success of a project and you're basically telling someone to forget about it and waste the maintainers time.

As a maintainer of a lot of large/popular projects, this couldn't be further from the truth. I stick that label onto things that are typically trivial and I don't want to allot much time to aside from approving/merging a PR and letting it get stuffed into the next release cycle.

Also, there's a lot to learn from closed PRs.

By just using common sense one can still contribute to a project without making a huge commitment. One of the most important things to do is to check how they respond to pull requests. The vast majority of projects are positive and responsive towards them. There are some that seem to sit in limbo for various reasons but even those can later be merged into an unofficial fork and still be useful.

> That is how you end up never contributing anything or having your first pull request be rejected.

Best way to avoid having your pull request rejected, is to make sure the change is actually wanted, which you can figure out by communicating.

So if some random webapp has a button in the wrong place, don't open a PR moving the button to the right place, open a issue and confirm it's wrong, and confirm the maintainer(s) would be fine with the suggested change. If something is unclear, clear it up before spending time on the PR.

Once consensus is reached, it'll be trivial to get the PR merged.

I've had dozens of "driveby" contributions get approved and merged. Just check the CONTRIBUTING.md if there's one and make sure your pull request includes everything the maintainer may want to know.

OP could also try "good first issue" and specify Python as the programming language in their search:

  - https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22+language%3Apython+sort%3Aupdated-desc


  - https://github.com/issues?page=2&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Ahelp-wanted+language%3Apython

The issue is that GitHub is a Microsoft company, a lot of people would like to help, but without having to have a relationship with corporations

I'd like to make a pitch for Openlibrary.org the free online library from Internet Archive that includes a fulltext search of millions of books.

I've been volunteering with them on and off for several years and it's always a lovely experience. Their backend is python and frontend mostly from python templates and some Vue for librarian stuff.

Every Tuesday they have a call on Zoom that everyone is welcome to join to share what they're working on, ask for help, and generally chat a bit. It's a great time.

Depending on what you're interested in there's a lot to do from helping build import pipelines for more book entries, writing bots to cleanup data, Performance improvements, better documenting public APIs, etc

I'm currently slowly working on a wikidata integration for their authors page. We also could use some help upgrading to Vue 3, mentors for Google summer of code would be helpful, find of ML projects needing help, moving away from old jQuery libraries, etc.

They can be quite responsive to PRs too like I blogged about here: https://blog.rayberger.org/idea-to-merged-in-less-than-30-mi...

For example, here's a small issue that could use some help on the python side: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/8928

Cool project. Where is the data and how was it acquired / what's the provenance? I found this:

> Data: We have a bunch of catalog data and fulltext acquired from various sources, either sitting in the Archive or to be uploaded to there. I think the acquisition processes (including web crawling scripts for some of the data) is outside the scope of an Open Library software install. There are a bunch of additional scripts to make the stuff usable in openlibrary and these need to be documented. These include TDB Conversion Scripts written by dbg, and (for OCA fulltext) Archive Spidering and Solr Importing scripts written by phr.

edit: I should add the question: does openlibrary support fulltext search of actual books or fulltext search of the metadata?

If you would like to see the data that's currently in Open library, there are dumps published every month or so. Where the data comes from is either partners or one off projects to scrape from public sources or sometimes just people adding what they like.

Fulltext search of actual books! And also metadata.

Check it out:

https://openlibrary.org/search/inside?q=hackernews

If you're serious about getting involved I'd say the best thing to do it just come to the meeting if you can. The GitHub has a lot of things that without context can be hard to pickup. Most of the easy stuff is on the JS side.

Actually yes! It could even be paid in the context of this year's Google Summer of Code:

https://github.com/borgbase/vorta

Or if you join as mentor, you will be supporting the Python Foundation.

If interested, just email the address in my HN profile.

Looks cool,

Would love to join as a mentor

Excellent! Already emailed you some more details.

This might help: https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/ - section 4 has handy links to find projects

https://github.com/rustedpy/result

Small Python library, slowly and steadily growing in use. New contributors, junior devs welcome. Mainly just maintenance work, occasional bug fixes and small feature development. Fine someone looking for casual involvement.

I find myself wanting a result type so often in python. This looks great. Thanks!

I'm having difficulty finding the time to keep up maintenance on pyfftw: https://github.com/pyFFTW/pyFFTW

There are loads of low hanging improvements to the build system that can be made (not least to support 3.12). Contributions gratefully received!

What software do you regularly use? I often find bugs I need fixed and open an issue & PR at the same time

Sure, I write small python CLI utils that help me solve media organization, media consumption, and sometimes data analysis. I use this every day on Linux and Android but I haven't tested it on other platforms. There are a lot of different subcommands and, although the CLI package will always be opinionated to some extent, there is a lot of niche functionality which might not need to exist. So I'm open to things being refactored or new subcommands being added. [1]

I have a lot of ideas for new ones, for example, I want a CLI that can take an artist name like "Theodor Kittelsen" and fetch highest quality public domain images--but I realize any implementation that does this well will be somewhat fragile so I haven't really attempted that yet. Other ideas that I have are often solved by piping output from one of my existing commands to another or adding some optional args to an existing command.

1. https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library

This is such a major effort: getting up to speed on existing code bases to the point you can add to them.

I feel for the author of this comment, you want to help out and work on stuff you have energy at the beginning, I find it easier to write my own code than to get up to speed with someone else's code. Because you lose steam or the activation energy to get the project built and ran and then played with and customised/changed/"hacked on" is a major effort.

I have been thinking a lot on an idea inspired by compiler design: intermediate representations and term rewriting.

If software features were an arbitrary stack of crisscrossing intermediate representations that are rewritten and mutually recursive/referential or parsed or transpiled into actual code, then we could inspect the intermediate representations to work out how things work.

It would be nice to narrow down on a piece of behaviour and see how it works from end-to-end. But in practice, you have an opaque wholeness of a codebase to understand.

A modern system or codebase at a company or mature open source project: it's like those games of wooden sticks or wooden bricks jenga where they're arranged in a pile and you're piling things on-top of things and if you unsettle it slightly, it falls over or doesn't work.

I used a piece of software called OpenGrok which renders a large code base as clickable surfable wiki in the browser. So you can explore codebases.

I have a primitive python SQL database on my github that can execute simple graph cypher queries, simple joins of multiple tables, "dynamodb" style queries and document database queries.

> This is such a major effort: getting up to speed on existing code bases to the point you can add to them.

It's a great thing that different projects have different scopes! If you're just looking to contribute to some project to gain experience, it might be a good idea to start with some smaller scoped-project before jumping into larger ones.

For example, if you're interested to contributing to the core of Kubernetes, maybe start by contributing to a plugin that interact with Kubernetes. Eventually, while trying to contribute to the plugin, you get indirectly exposed to some of the internals of the parent project, and eventually you'll be able to faster jump into contributing to Kubernetes itself.

Freeciv 3D: https://github.com/fciv-net/fciv-net/

Seems to only have a small amount of Python though, which is not what the requester was asking. ;)

• C 48.0%

• JavaScript 43.5%

• Python 2.3%

Depends on what are you interested in eg if you enjoy genealogy I'd suggest going for Gramps https://github.com/gramps-project/gramps .

Maybe share more info on what you like so we can suggest something you might enjoy?

I am interested though. Thanks for sharing.

There are also websites listing such projects, search for "oss help wanted" or similar. E.g. http://github-help-wanted.com

It is however much easier if you contribute to a project that you already know and use personally.

Thanks for sharing this.

Looks pretty useful

I saw you mention Python, but if you also happen to be interested in Golang and data streaming, https://benthos.dev is a good project to contribute to. There are quite a few issues open on the GitHub project which anyone can pick up. Writing new connectors and adding tests / docs is always a good place to start. The maintainer is super-friendly and he's always active on the https://benthos.dev/community channels. I'm also there most of the time, since I've been contributing to the project for several years now.

This is awesome! Not OP but I think I found something to work on - I've worked as a backend for a company like fivetran so I feel I might have something worth offering

You're welcome! Please feel free to join the community channels I linked above. There are blobtalk meetings on Discord every 2 weeks where we can discuss ideas in detail and, otherwise, we're always active in the chat.

I made https://www.codeshelter.co/ back in the day for this exact purpose, maybe one of the projects there will pique your interest.

I have some open source Python projects that could use some help.

I have been working on a static site generator which uses Flask.

https://github.com/siecje/htmd

I have been learning trio (async Python library) by implementing beanstalkd.

https://github.com/Siecje/beanstalkd-asyncio

I know about this project https://www.codetriage.com/?language=Python that might be of interest to you. Basically you pick what repos you want to work on and receive issue suggestions in your inbox.

I have a small python project here

https://github.com/ericoporto/agstoolbox

There are a few number of open issues but if you play with it and find something else you want to add just open an issue and ask about it.

Perhaps this helps: https://quine.sh/

I have no experience with the platform myself, just bumped into it by coincidence when my OSS project (written it Typescript) was featured

One developer of Node.js seems to tag "need help" often in github releases.

Would you be able to link to that direct specific issue for more context

https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/51362

https://github.com/mwmeyer/doda - AI ( LLM ) Terminal Assistant

https://www.codetriage.com/ was made for this

I'm looking for contributors always to hack together.

I have a project now in Python. Feel free to reach out.

Would love to hear more about your project

Why not create one of your own? There are so many ideas a person can come up with these days, and so much information available free online, on how to do things - even before LLMs, which I personally would avoid, for a learning project like this.

Plus, if you create your own project, you can make it into a product, and try to market and sell it.

It's fun!

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