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Ask HN: How to get into open-source web development?

9 points by sandmanxc ↗ HN
I've been a web developer for about 4 years now, and I feel like I have a lot to learn from collaborating on open-source projects. Most of my experience is with working alone on projects, and 95% of the time I was being rushed as clients in my country don't understand that building websites takes time, and that quality matters.

My question is: How should I look for projects on which to contribute to over weekends? Are there chatrooms / aggregators for this sort of thing?

9 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 46.4 ms ] thread
bweston92
Play with some projects and discover bugs, have a look on GitHub.
davidw
Here are some simple ones:

* Help triage some bugs - go into a recent bug report, and confirm that the bug is real and reproducible.

* Help out fixing some bugs in the tools you use. Go into the bug tracker and find something you think you can fix. Start with something smaller/easier so you learn the process.

* Write some documentation for the tools you use.

valevk
Since you've been a "web developer for about 4 years", I assume you have have gathered experience with some open source technology. Why not try to help those projects? You are already familiar with their structure, and might get an easier start. Just check thier website and start solving bugs!
anujdeshpande
One of those open coursewares might help If a student/woman I would suggest GSoC or OPW. That stuff helps for sure
walterbell
Pick a project which is applying OSS to a community/industry/subject/problem that is meaningful and/or fun to you. In the most successful OSS projects, the developer is the user or customer.
CmonDev
I would recommend picking a project that you would really personally like, maybe something that is not as messy as web development.
jbranchaud
This isn't necessarily open-source work, but it is still opportunities to collaborate on real projects with other developers -- https://assembly.com/
phantom_oracle
I defined this for someone else who had the same question a few days ago. There are 4 ways to contribute:

- bugs (find and report them)

- code (the part everyone wants to do)

- docs (the part that everyone should do, but has been given second-class status due to everyone thinking writing code is the only way to feel like you're contributing)

- tests (ever clicked on "button" and everything broke, well if someone wrote a test for the functionality there, it likely wouldn't have)

I urge you to start with the things the pure-coders hate, and that is well-defined, noob-friendly documentation.

You'll never be given the high status of "genius programmer living in basement, changing world", but your documentation and "dumbing that shit down" way of explaining things will sometimes make the project more successful and will carry more weight as far as bringing more users of the code-base.

gault8121
I'm coordinating the development of Quill.org, an open source platform for writing apps. We're a nonprofit organization, and Quill is a free tool. We currently have three apps under development, and we've got 40,000 students using our grammar app.

We'd love to have your help. You can browse through some of our different projects our issues to see if you find something interesting.

Quill.org - a simple LMS for apps built in Rails: https://github.com/empirical-org/Quill-Writer

Quill Writer - an Angular/Firebase Writing Game: https://github.com/empirical-org/Empirical-Wordpress

Quill Community - our wordpress community dashboard: https://github.com/empirical-org/Empirical-Wordpress

Please email me - peter@quill.org, if you're interested and would like to ask some questions.