You can search github for labels like “needs-help” or “good-first-issue” etc. Many many projects would love help, but aren’t asking for it. Example query: <a href="https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Aneeds-help">https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Anee...</a><p>My recommendation tho of course is to find an existing project you’re passionate about, find their tracker, and dig in! Few softwares are ever truly done. Make one you love even better.
I'd like to make a pitch for Openlibrary.org the free online library from Internet Archive that includes a fulltext search of millions of books.<p>I've been volunteering with them on and off for several years and it's always a lovely experience. Their backend is python and frontend mostly from python templates and some Vue for librarian stuff.<p>Every Tuesday they have a call on Zoom that everyone is welcome to join to share what they're working on, ask for help, and generally chat a bit. It's a great time.<p>Depending on what you're interested in there's a lot to do from helping build import pipelines for more book entries, writing bots to cleanup data, Performance improvements, better documenting public APIs, etc<p>I'm currently slowly working on a wikidata integration for their authors page. We also could use some help upgrading to Vue 3, mentors for Google summer of code would be helpful, find of ML projects needing help, moving away from old jQuery libraries, etc.<p>They can be quite responsive to PRs too like I blogged about here: <a href="https://blog.rayberger.org/idea-to-merged-in-less-than-30-minutes" rel="nofollow">https://blog.rayberger.org/idea-to-merged-in-less-than-30-mi...</a><p>For example, here's a small issue that could use some help on the python side: <a href="https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/8928">https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/8928</a>
Actually yes! It could even be paid in the context of this year's Google Summer of Code:<p><a href="https://github.com/borgbase/vorta">https://github.com/borgbase/vorta</a><p>Or if you join as mentor, you will be supporting the Python Foundation.<p>If interested, just email the address in my HN profile.
This might help: <a href="https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/</a> - section 4 has handy links to find projects
<a href="https://github.com/rustedpy/result">https://github.com/rustedpy/result</a><p>Small Python library, slowly and steadily growing in use.
New contributors, junior devs welcome. Mainly just maintenance work, occasional bug fixes and small feature development. Fine someone looking for casual involvement.
I'm having difficulty finding the time to keep up maintenance on pyfftw: <a href="https://github.com/pyFFTW/pyFFTW">https://github.com/pyFFTW/pyFFTW</a><p>There are loads of low hanging improvements to the build system that can be made (not least to support 3.12). Contributions gratefully received!
Sure, I write small python CLI utils that help me solve media organization, media consumption, and sometimes data analysis. I use this every day on Linux and Android but I haven't tested it on other platforms. There are a lot of different subcommands and, although the CLI package will always be opinionated to some extent, there is a lot of niche functionality which might not need to exist. So I'm open to things being refactored or new subcommands being added. [1]<p>I have a lot of ideas for new ones, for example, I want a CLI that can take an artist name like "Theodor Kittelsen" and fetch highest quality public domain images--but I realize any implementation that does this well will be somewhat fragile so I haven't really attempted that yet. Other ideas that I have are often solved by piping output from one of my existing commands to another or adding some optional args to an existing command.<p>1. <a href="https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library">https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library</a>
This is such a major effort: getting up to speed on existing code bases to the point you can add to them.<p>I feel for the author of this comment, you want to help out and work on stuff you have energy at the beginning, I find it easier to write my own code than to get up to speed with someone else's code. Because you lose steam or the activation energy to get the project built and ran and then played with and customised/changed/"hacked on" is a major effort.<p>I have been thinking a lot on an idea inspired by compiler design: intermediate representations and term rewriting.<p>If software features were an arbitrary stack of crisscrossing intermediate representations that are rewritten and mutually recursive/referential or parsed or transpiled into actual code, then we could inspect the intermediate representations to work out how things work.<p>It would be nice to narrow down on a piece of behaviour and see how it works from end-to-end. But in practice, you have an opaque wholeness of a codebase to understand.<p>A modern system or codebase at a company or mature open source project: it's like those games of wooden sticks or wooden bricks jenga where they're arranged in a pile and you're piling things on-top of things and if you unsettle it slightly, it falls over or doesn't work.<p>I used a piece of software called OpenGrok which renders a large code base as clickable surfable wiki in the browser. So you can explore codebases.<p>I have a primitive python SQL database on my github that can execute simple graph cypher queries, simple joins of multiple tables, "dynamodb" style queries and document database queries.
Depends on what are you interested in eg if you enjoy genealogy I'd suggest going for Gramps <a href="https://github.com/gramps-project/gramps">https://github.com/gramps-project/gramps</a> .<p>Maybe share more info on what you like so we can suggest something you might enjoy?
There are also websites listing such projects, search for "oss help wanted" or similar. E.g. <a href="http://github-help-wanted.com" rel="nofollow">http://github-help-wanted.com</a><p>It is however much easier if you contribute to a project that you already know and use personally.
I saw you mention Python, but if you also happen to be interested in Golang and data streaming, <a href="https://benthos.dev" rel="nofollow">https://benthos.dev</a> is a good project to contribute to. There are quite a few issues open on the GitHub project which anyone can pick up. Writing new connectors and adding tests / docs is always a good place to start. The maintainer is super-friendly and he's always active on the <a href="https://benthos.dev/community" rel="nofollow">https://benthos.dev/community</a> channels. I'm also there most of the time, since I've been contributing to the project for several years now.
I made <a href="https://www.codeshelter.co/" rel="nofollow">https://www.codeshelter.co/</a> back in the day for this exact purpose, maybe one of the projects there will pique your interest.
I have some open source Python projects that could use some help.<p>I have been working on a static site generator which uses Flask.<p><a href="https://github.com/siecje/htmd">https://github.com/siecje/htmd</a><p>I have been learning trio (async Python library) by implementing beanstalkd.<p><a href="https://github.com/Siecje/beanstalkd-asyncio">https://github.com/Siecje/beanstalkd-asyncio</a>
I know about this project <a href="https://www.codetriage.com/?language=Python" rel="nofollow">https://www.codetriage.com/?language=Python</a> that might be of interest to you. Basically you pick what repos you want to work on and receive issue suggestions in your inbox.
I have a small python project here<p><a href="https://github.com/ericoporto/agstoolbox">https://github.com/ericoporto/agstoolbox</a><p>There are a few number of open issues but if you play with it and find something else you want to add just open an issue and ask about it.
Perhaps this helps: <a href="https://quine.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://quine.sh/</a><p>I have no experience with the platform myself, just bumped into it by coincidence when my OSS project (written it Typescript) was featured
Why not create one of your own? There are so many ideas a person can come up with these days, and so much information available free online, on how to do things - even before LLMs, which I personally would avoid, for a learning project like this.<p>Plus, if you create your own project, you can make it into a product, and try to market and sell it.<p>It's fun!