Ask HN: Need help finding open source projects to contribute.

2 points·ananth99··5 comments

I'm a newbie Hacker and Developer and want to contribute to Open Source Projects. I thought HN community can help me with a list of projects that I can look into. :) Thanks in advance!

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Contributing to an unfamiliar project is like buying a gift for a stranger: they might appreciate the sentiment, but your effort will most likely be wasted.

I recommend contributing to projects you already use. That way you'll have a better idea of what specific features or issues you should work on. Also, you'll be more likely to succeed, since you'll be motivated out of self-interest as well as general goodwill toward the community.

The best way forward is to look at open bugs against software you use, whether it be "less", "screen", "ssh", or something more large.

Standalone applications that you yourself use will be more rewarding.

Beyond that it is hard to say where to start; are you a C coder? PHP? Perl? Javascript? Ruby? If you gave even a hint of your level of experience and your preferred language/environment then people could be more useful.

I'm primarily a PHP person. New to Ruby. Didn't want to restrict it to a particular domain. That's why didn't include my tech capability. :-) Thanks for your feedback!

I'd suggest browsing through Sourceforge's projects and try to pick one that's a good fit for you, from a technology (e.g. Java) or functional area (e.g. CRM) standpoint: http://sourceforge.net/directory/freshness:recently-updated/

Thanks! Will surely look into it. :)

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