Contribute to an open source software project

I want to contribute substantially to one of the software programs I actually use. I would love it if I could contribute to the code, but I am really not a programmer by trade. I may end up writing really amazing documentation or answer newbie questions on the listservs or something more “mundane” like that. But at some point, sometime, I want to give back to the community.

HI

曾经为pasdoc做过汉化文件，且和它的主要作者有过3次电邮交流

I have just passed my SCJP and am now working on getting the SCWCD. I would like to contribute to an open source project, but haven’t explored any possibilities up to now. In the meantime, I’ll keep learning…

A free source project in Spanish, it is a web application framework :)
check it out please www.zenphp.es :)

I just did a little hack to OSSEC HIDS to let me change the display name of the email it sends. I might formalize this with a diff, making it configurable in the conf, and send it to the development list for consideration.

First I’ll monitor the dev list for a bit to see what’s shaking.

The past couple days, I’ve looked into contributing to an open source project – any recognizable one – and it seems like there is a significant barrier to entry to do this.

I started by searching Amazon.com, and all the books out there cover open source from a bird’s eye view, which isn’t very helpful. I am looking for printed material on actually contributing, rather than some overview.

Just browsing around on Ohloh, there are so many different projects that I would love to be apart of. Firefox, Linux, Rails, Subversion… the list goes on and on. I’ve used all of these software projects extensively, and I know all the requisite programming languages they are written in. However, I browse around on their bug tracking databases, and all the issues seem esoteric; I definitely couldn’t fix them without deep underlying knowledge of the system.

It would be nice to be able to cut my teeth on something. I suppose I could start with a smaller project – one that is smaller/newer which would, by definition, have more work to be done.

The proportion of open source projects that succeed in delivering something worthwhile, expressed as a percentage, without too many decimal places is, well, nil. Maybe two in a thousand, possibly three, but certainly not a whole percent.

However, the experience is still worth the time and energy and you will definitely learn something and meet some interesting people. Do it as part of a team. But don’t expect to change the world.

cizra (no files yet) is a forum engine for Ruby on Rails that I have started. It’s going slowly, so I figure once it’s done this goal will be complete.

No major contributions yet, but I had to mark some goal as completed to free up a slot on 43things. Marked “I want to to this again”.