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ASk HN: quickest way to get involved in Open Source?
9 points by tootlol 5450 days ago
What is the quickest way to contribute to OS? How did you contribute the first time? Do I have to wait until I get alot better to do it?
3 comments

I've been thinking about this lately too. I think it could be beneficial to have something like the co-founder wish list (spreadsheet) where people can post easy tasks they don't have time or skills to tackle (test this app on android, take inline CSS and consolidate it, add Ajax, document this etc). Maybe a twitter hashtag too. Put it together and link to Github through their API. Issues in Github can have labels, so maybe if you submit a repo to the site and have issues labelled (easy) they get pulled in and people can pick off issues they could help with.

Ultimately, of course, this doesn't solve your problem. However, it would address the issue nicely since this question is asked repeatedly in many places around the web.

1. Identify something in your life that bothers you

2. Find an OS project working to address that, or an OS project which you can use to address that

3. Scratch your itch!

What do you want to do? Because open source needs documentation, support, coding, interaction design, etc, etc.

You can even start by helping out with translations http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2766678