

Ask HN: How can I get started with an open source project? - barakstout

I am sure lots of you are involved with one or more open source projects. How did you get started? Did you start the project or join in?<p>Thanks,
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daleharvey
Starting a project is a very different experience from joining an existing
one, what is your motivations?

By the fact you asked this question I am guessing you have heard it is good
learning experience / opportunity to work on open source, if so then joining
an existing project is what you want to be doing. There is no lack of
thousands of single author open source github, they often server a practical
purpose for their author but you rarely learn something new (past technical
questions) by working on a project by yourself.

Look at the software you use day to day, find out whether they are open
source, pick out the ones that are closely aligned with your skillset and ones
that you enjoy the most. If you find you dont have much choice after that,
look at alternatives to the software you use, it will very often have an open
source alternative.

Once you have found a project, Join the community, thats generally the mailing
list and an IRC channel. Look through their bug tracker, often projects will
label their bugs as 'goodfirstbug', they will almost always need help with
triaging / reproducing bugs and improving bug reports and often with
documentation and the like.

When you start doing this introduce yourself to the community, say you would
like to get involved and ask for guidance, good open source projects will
usually have people that are very happy to help out newcomers to get
acclimatised .

Dont expect to join a project and make sweeping changes or redesign a bunch,
you will often need to become familiar before you understand the project
dynamics.

Good luck :)

~~~
ritratt
This response helped. I myself am faced with a similar problem. I like
cryptography so I learnt it and implemented it in some self-developed
applications. But all i was doing was using API's/libraries/modules written by
someone else. I wanted to be a part of the API creation/maintenance process
which is actually just being part of some open-source projects. I am going to
try the approach mentioned by you.

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davyjones
I wanted to get started in the open source community by contributing to some
well established ones out there. I went with Mozilla Firefox. Signed up on
their "Help" page and was contacted by a mentor in a couple of days time.

I was able to patch one bug successfully and while I created another patch for
another bug, the owner of that specific module rejected the patch. And he/she
wasn't too civil about it. That was offputting really.

After pondering a bit, I realised that there was a need for another GUI for
PostgreSQL based on my own experience with the default GUI tool bundled with
postgres.

I created pgXplorer (<http://pgxplorer.com>). I am extremely satisfied with
it. So far some 16 watchers and about a 1000 uniques in 20 days. I am thinking
of adding some killer features that will really set it apart from the current
open source GUI tool out there.

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vgnet
Here's a place that teaches you about joining, giving nice experience for when
you start your own: <http://openhatch.org/>

