Ask HN: Good open source projects for beginners? (early 2018)

6 points by MikeTheGreat ↗ HN
What are some good open source projects for beginners here in early 2018? Ideally I'd love pointers to projects that have a culture of nurturing new programmers - people who have had a couple quarters/semesters of programming at the college level, but are otherwise just getting started.

(I saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9305398 - the general advice in it is great; I was hoping to get an updated list for here in February 2018.)(Personally, I'd love to find smaller projects - it seems like a bunch of the projects listed in the earlier post are big things, such as Mozilla, Mercurial, Ruby)

(Side-question: I think this is a reasonable 'AskHN' topic, but if it's not I'd be happy to revise it and/or take it down).

5 comments

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A good open source project is one that matches your existing skills and the skills that you want to build.

My own FLOSS efforts mostly revolve around the Linux audio community (mostly musical software). There's plenty of projects from the very small to mid-large size. My focus is primarily on ZynAddSubFX (https://github.com/zynaddsubfx/ ) and the project is looking for new contributors. Depending upon an individual's interests and goals of contributing to FLOSS I may be able to direct them to other similar projects.

https://whatcanidoformozilla.org/

I have a good experience contributing to the Rust programming language. Rust e.g. has open issues on Github that are labeled 'E-mentor', when you decide to tackle such an issue, you will be mentored by an experienced Rust contributor.

The Rust community is generally very friendly and welcoming.

If you are student check out Google Summer of Code 2018