

Ask HN: How can I contribute? - jmsbrwr

To put it bluntly, I currently offer no value to the tech community that has gotten me to a position where I am employable; and I don&#x27;t like that.<p>What I am looking for is advice on how I can give back. Yes, I know I could write some blog posts and craft amazing open source projects that make everyone&#x27;s life easier, but I don&#x27;t know how. What do I write about? What would my amazing open source project do?<p>Also, I would like to join discussions here on HN. The problem with that is that I am the kind of person who, if I don&#x27;t have anything to add to the conversation, does not say anything. And I almost always feel like I have nothing to add.<p>How do I get over all this and become useful?
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toyg
The classic answer is: "please write all this boring documentation stuff for
$your_favourite_project", or pick a boring bug report in some project, triage
ot and fix it. It's all very valuable stuff, but it's fracking boring.

The real answer is: find a project you like, even a small one, and patch it to
do something you find even more useful. If you think you can't do it, maybe
it's a good chance to use it as a skill-up project. Or, rewrite an interesting
lib or useful tool from $language_you_dont_like to $language_you_love. Or just
put on GitHub some private tool you wrote that someone else might find useful.

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bjourne
You know, people (myself included) write on HN not because they want to
"contribute" or being "useful to the community." But because it is an
interesting past time. Is being useful to other hackers really your goal?

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helen842000
You could write the process and steps that got you to where you are now, for
others who also want to become employable.

Focus on replying to the questions in the 'ask' thread. This is the community
directly asking for feedback/input.

Your best projects will come from working on things you're passionate about.

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johnny22
work on an existing open source project that does something you need/want.

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jmsbrwr
This is a problem I've had before. I couldn't find anything that I needed or
wanted. Recently though, AngularJS has struck a chord, so maybe I'll give that
a try.

~~~
tagabek
Well, if you're looking to give back, you could try finding something that
many people want.

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_random_
Make a decent pivot table for BootStrap + KnockOut.js :).

