Ask HN: How can I get started with an open source project?
I am sure lots of you are involved with one or more open source projects. How did you get started? Did you start the project or join in?
Thanks,
Thanks,
By the fact you asked this question I am guessing you have heard it is good learning experience / opportunity to work on open source, if so then joining an existing project is what you want to be doing. There is no lack of thousands of single author open source github, they often server a practical purpose for their author but you rarely learn something new (past technical questions) by working on a project by yourself.
Look at the software you use day to day, find out whether they are open source, pick out the ones that are closely aligned with your skillset and ones that you enjoy the most. If you find you dont have much choice after that, look at alternatives to the software you use, it will very often have an open source alternative.
Once you have found a project, Join the community, thats generally the mailing list and an IRC channel. Look through their bug tracker, often projects will label their bugs as 'goodfirstbug', they will almost always need help with triaging / reproducing bugs and improving bug reports and often with documentation and the like.
When you start doing this introduce yourself to the community, say you would like to get involved and ask for guidance, good open source projects will usually have people that are very happy to help out newcomers to get acclimatised .
Dont expect to join a project and make sweeping changes or redesign a bunch, you will often need to become familiar before you understand the project dynamics.
Good luck :)
I was able to patch one bug successfully and while I created another patch for another bug, the owner of that specific module rejected the patch. And he/she wasn't too civil about it. That was offputting really.
After pondering a bit, I realised that there was a need for another GUI for PostgreSQL based on my own experience with the default GUI tool bundled with postgres.
I created pgXplorer (http://pgxplorer.com). I am extremely satisfied with it. So far some 16 watchers and about a 1000 uniques in 20 days. I am thinking of adding some killer features that will really set it apart from the current open source GUI tool out there.