Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems hard to find meaningful open-source projects that have something a new developer could tackle. Often looking up labels like "good-first-issue" on GitHub give an abundance of random tasks seemingly only made for things like Hacktoberfest.
So, anyone have any tips?
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Also depends on what type of opensource project you're looking for. Small but promising, then owner will rather no doubts welcome any help. Or big and popular, than you perhaps follow some serious guidelines for PRs you want to submit.
As for knowledge, of course it is important. But I would always give priority to projects where owners are able to explain things to newbies, for that would mean they perfectly understandwhat they are up to, and thus provide their project with good potential.
I have used issuehub.io and I actually wound up contributing to the site itself. It scrapes github issues, you need to remember/know that PR's are also issues.
Maybe the open Github issues on dev.to itself? At least that's a "product" that you're already using, so it might feel less "forced" to contribute to it ...
SourceSort looks like a good resource for finding projects that need contributions. The focus on measuring how healthy a project is definitely seems useful for new contributors.
Well, I understand you are looking to help out open source projects and are wondering which ones get into.
I never really went that way as a beginner, but despite the fact I'm not a beginner anymore, it's not easy to find out how to actually help. It takes quite some time to get into a whole new source code, it's no trivial task.
Nowadays, I usually help when I rely on a project, but I'm not looking for projects to fix, there are just too many of them! :D
We develop many things that are open source at Unly (we're a French company helping students access Higher Education), but they're not so "meaningful" to others, yet. If you want to take a look, please do! I wonder how a fresh eye would understand the purpose of those projects. github.com/unlyEd
Also been wanting to contribute for a while and faced the same problem. Lately I've noticed that almost any open source tool/framework I'm using has a bug or something that doesn't work as expected. So instead of trying to hack around it I immediately open an issue on github, and if it's really a bug I fix it and make a PR.
Still I don't know what's the process to get to be one of the core team that actually build features / architecture.
I usually recommend writing documentation.
Adding demos always helps too. Spending a lot of time developing a project sometimes makes it hard to see it from a user's perspective.
Adding features usually involves picking up something from the roadmap.
You could also try to help by optimizing the NPM package. Here's a guide.
evanplaice.com/thought/npm-package...
I recommend issuehub.io to find issues on github in your language of choice. It is a great way to find projects that you are interested in.
Look for the “first-timers-only” tag. That’s a decent one. But you’re right this is a large problem and one I personally experienced back when I was self-taught.
Check out OpenEMR if you can. I’m one of the devs on it, but it’s pretty much the only Open Source app available for hospitals and clinics. Does a lot to reduce healthcare costs. Anyway we could always use JS or PHP ppl and would be happy to give you fun starter issues :)
A friend of mine had mentioned OpenEMR a while back and I am a PHP dev. Looking to kickstart this journey. Any links on how to get started would be much appreciated. Thanks.
"good-first-issue" are not used by enough projects to find them blindly. Most maintainer welcome contributions, but don't advertise for it. As already said, try to improve the tools you already use. Whatever small the change is.
My first time was with a pixel art web app named Piskel. I add a listener to the escape key to close a popover.