College students and new graduates are always told on Hacker News "Get a GitHub page. Contribute to open source projects."<p>What are some projects a junior/entry/student level developer can hope to contribute to?
Two things:<p>1. Why do they have to be "junior"-level? When you start a job, do you want to be doing easy stuff? Or do you want to be doing the fun, challenging stuff?<p>If you're looking for projects that have bugs that are easy, or easy-but-tedious-and-time-consuming, you probably won't find very many. The easy bugs tend to just get fixed, the tedious ones? You don't want to work on those.<p>2. I've always wondered how far people get with other people saying "contribute to this project because I like it!" — at the end of the day, after you've spent the past hours working on something else, are you <i>really</i> going to spend the next hour coding for something you don't care about? Or are you going to say "meh" and play Starcraft?<p>There must be some app/tool/… that you use that is open source? Thats a good ones to look into contributing to. Because you already use it, so its easier to care about it.
I dont know about projects on github, but im involved in a couple of projects that are looking for developers. One is for a non profit. And one is for a for profit. They are using cutting edge technologies such as django and node and mongodb and whatnot.
Ideally pick something that you use or are interested in.<p>Django is pretty well setup for new contributors:
<a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/howto/contribute/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/howto/contribute/</a>