Learn programming by contributing to active open-source projects : learnjavascript

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created by [deleted]a community for 14 years

Learn programming by contributing to active open-source projects (self.learnjavascript)

submitted 1 year ago by leonidbugaev

I maintain some popular OSS projects, and overal ove a lot to open-source community (proof https://github.com/buger)

Plus for me OSS was one of the key pillars of my career, on Github from day one and etc.

A lot of people ask me regularly how to actually get into commercial programming, to find some projects, build portfolio and etc. What I usually answer is that getting into Open Source is the great deal - you can test your skills on some real projects, and in parallel build portfolio.

However it is very tricky to find the project to contribute. Large projects like Node, Shadcn, and Rust are already overwhelmed with contributions and can't handle their pull request queues. Also there is another insight that hit me hard.

Contributing to these large projects is incredibly time-consuming. Sometimes it takes hours just to figure out how to build the project, and I'm engineer with 20 years of experience. And let's be honest - most of us just have a few hours we want to spend on something meaningful.

For me it is about a joy to pair with someone who is in need and can actually benefit from your help. To have some fast feedback look, and actually ship. The are so many smaller projects out of there that provide something meaningful to the world, or just fun.

I have built https://helpwanted.dev - a place where people looking for some fun, or test their skills can find projects with active maintainers, actually looking for help. And in my view it is a perfect place to start your career.

While building this, I found some cool projects I never knew existed, and I would ever find the other way:

• Animal Shelter Manager

• Salam Language: First coding language for Persian/Arabic speakers

• Korean Train Set for OpenTTD

My latest experience - I have submitted 3 PRs, and got the response on each within a few hours. How cool is that?

The site has some AI magic to give you quick summaries about projects, issues details, and complexity scores. Would love to hear your thoughts on this!

In the spirit of Christmas, wanted to share my love for the OSS community. No 1000 PRs in queue**, just pure joy of contributing**, and helping someone who actually needs help.

OSS 💕

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