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Ask HN: Open source projects on GitHub that need junior level help?

14 points| mspaint | 14 years ago

College students and new graduates are always told on Hacker News "Get a GitHub page. Contribute to open source projects."

What are some projects a junior/entry/student level developer can hope to contribute to?

6 comments

order

Zev|14 years ago

Two things:

1. Why do they have to be "junior"-level? When you start a job, do you want to be doing easy stuff? Or do you want to be doing the fun, challenging stuff?

If you're looking for projects that have bugs that are easy, or easy-but-tedious-and-time-consuming, you probably won't find very many. The easy bugs tend to just get fixed, the tedious ones? You don't want to work on those.

2. I've always wondered how far people get with other people saying "contribute to this project because I like it!" — at the end of the day, after you've spent the past hours working on something else, are you really going to spend the next hour coding for something you don't care about? Or are you going to say "meh" and play Starcraft?

There must be some app/tool/… that you use that is open source? Thats a good ones to look into contributing to. Because you already use it, so its easier to care about it.

mspaint|14 years ago

1. Why junior level? Because I don't want to add memory leaks trying to add features to mongrel2, I'm not enough of a ruby wizard to hack on Rails or Sinatra yet, etc. When I start a project, I want to be doing stuff that will challenge me, but I can still get something done on. When I am hired, I don't think they're going to put me in charge, I think they're going to assign me small things to work on until I learn more and prove myself.

2. My full time job is looking for work. I have many part time jobs, like freelancing, helping my family, farm work, etc. I want to contribute so I can learn. Starcraft will not make me any happier a year from now, or even a month from now.

I use lots of open source. I spent most of a day once optimistically installing what I needed to build Firefox, only to read how long it takes even on quad-core meat grinders. I have a single core 2005 vintage laptop.

In short I don't care if I don't care about the project. The goal is help the job search, sharpen my skills, and maybe contribute something while I'm at it.

clojurerocks|14 years ago

I dont know about projects on github, but im involved in a couple of projects that are looking for developers. One is for a non profit. And one is for a for profit. They are using cutting edge technologies such as django and node and mongodb and whatnot.