[Tutor] Looking for open source projects to contribute

[Mats Wichmann]

On 9/27/21 13:14, Lucas Cavalcante wrote:
> Hello dear Pythonista colleagues,
> 
> I'm looking for an open-source project to contribute.
> 
> I've been studying, practicing, and working with Python for the last 6
> years, and Django for the last 2 years, etc.
> I'm currently employed in a private business, but I'm eager to "level up"
> as a developer.
> I also have this particular goal to cause a positive impact on society
> through coding.
> 
> May you have any advice or recommendations?

It's easy to find OSS projects that need some help: it's basically all 
of them. Not quite all of them are as prepared to accept new help, 
depending on personalities of maintainers, etc.

Some projects - you can search for this on github - use a help-wanted 
label to mark issues that need a contributor.  You can look like this 
(two examples):

https://github.com/topics/help-wanted
https://github.com/topics/contributions-welcome

etc.  Then you get to decide if those are worth pursuing.  Many issues 
get filed that are very important to someone, but for the maintainers 
they're only "that sound like it would be nice to have, but not a 
priority, we might consider merging it in if someone contributed it" - 
that kind are not really the road to future happiness.

The hard part is picking the right one... offering an opinion, you 
should pick a project or projects that really interest you, because the 
hump to becoming a productive contributor involves  a lot of hard work 
and in some cases can be very frustrating in the beginning. It's easier 
to come through that with an attitude of "This is really cool stuff, and 
I'd like to help make it better" than with the less personal "I'd like 
to make a difference, so maybe this is a good place".

There are a lot of resources on this on the Internet, not all of which 
are at all well organized.