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Keep in mind that there is no shortage of open source developers out there. I'm not trying to discourage you from contributing to open source projects (the comm

Keep in mind that there is no shortage of open source developers out there. I'm not trying to discourage you from contributing to open source projects (the community needs you!), only to remind you that a post like this can never fully answer your question. Browse SourceForge or GitHub and you'll find literally tens of thousands of projects ranging from huge enterprise-scale development efforts that will likely never implement your code (OpenOffice, Linux kernel, Firefox) to small projects that are a cool idea but were never even developed to the point of an alpha release. Personally, I like contributing to the latter of those categories. The small, cool-idea projects that never got their feet off the ground are the best places to start. There are several reasons I support this route, primarily that: 1.) Smaller projects need you more, and your code is more likely to actually be committed to a release version. 2.) You will actually be designing code. Monolithic projects like Firefox or OpenOffice certainly need developers, but mostly for bug fixes and slow feature additions. Developing for a small open source project will see you actually rolling out functionality--a skillset upon which you can build. Good luck!

apotheon 16y ago
> Browse SourceForge or GitHub . . . or BitBucket or Google Code or even Launchpad. I use BitBucket almost exclusively, because I prefer Mercurial over Git, for instance. So does a friend of mine, who has about ten different small (but worthy) projects -- probably perfect for someone looking to get started with his/her first contributions to an open source project, but (unfortunately for this case) all but one are in Ruby and that one is Perl; there's no Python or PHP in the list. Anyway . . . start with whichever of these things supports the version control system you prefer. I think that's probably the best approach to finding projects to which you want to contribute, rather than picking one of the two most-mentioned code hosting sites in the open source community. Hell, I've got a couple of small projects on BitBucket that could use some contributions, too -- but they're also Ruby, and probably less likely to be exciting for someone like the OP anyway.

apotheon 16y ago

> Browse SourceForge or GitHub . . . or BitBucket or Google Code or even Launchpad. I use BitBucket almost exclusively, because I prefer Mercurial over Git, for instance. So does a friend of mine, who has about ten different small (but worthy) projects -- probably perfect for someone looking to get started with his/her first contributions to an open source project, but (unfortunately for this case) all but one are in Ruby and that one is Perl; there's no Python or PHP in the list. Anyway . . . start with whichever of these things supports the version control system you prefer. I think that's probably the best approach to finding projects to which you want to contribute, rather than picking one of the two most-mentioned code hosting sites in the open source community. Hell, I've got a couple of small projects on BitBucket that could use some contributions, too -- but they're also Ruby, and probably less likely to be exciting for someone like the OP anyway.