
Ask HN: How do I start contributing to Open Source software - singluere
I am an intermediate level software engineer at a Bay area startup. I enjoy using several open source tools in my everyday job and want to contribute back. However, there seems to be no good way to know which projects have helpful communities and good documentation for a newbie to get started. How do I chose which projects to contribute to ?
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detaro
Generally you should get a basic feel from looking at the bug trackers and
other community resources. Bad documentation you should be able to spot by
looking at it or notice early when trying to follow it.

Do they have clear instructions on how to get started, run tests etc? How's
the tone? What are discussions on PRs like, is there good feedback or are PRs
from non-core people just ignored?

IMHO that's something you have to judge yourself, if you feel comfortable with
a project and what kind of resources you need. (E.g. for me, many javascript
projects are hard to contribute to because I have little experience with
common tooling. But at the same time I know that in the JS community, most
people are familiar with them and would not see this as a hurdle, and I would
not necessarily fault the project for it.)

Some projects explicitly mark issues as "beginner friendly", "good first
project" etc.

And try to pick something you use or care about: It's a lot harder to stay
motivated if you don't really care about the end result.

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mtmail
There are a couple of helpful resources at the bottom of
[https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/](https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/)
That event started today.

(as a German I laugh about the naming of course. Munich Oktoberfest starts
middle of September and ends first weekend of October)

------
krakensden
You might want to check out up-for-grabs.net, a place for projects that are
looking for new contributors.

