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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

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 14y ago
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.

ritratt 14y ago

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.