7 open source projects to cut your teeth on (and the ones to avoid)
Osier-Mixon says that documentation is a high-impact, visible way to contribute to open source projects, but how do you pick which project to help?
"In general, open source works best when people scratch their own itch, like I did," says Kaplan-Moss. When Kaplan-Moss first contributed to the Python project, he says he did so for purely selfish reasons. "I ran into a bug that got in the way of a project I was doing — something having to do with reading and writing files on OSX — and needed to write a patch to fix my problem," he explains.
Kaplan-Moss recommends that anyone looking to get started in open source start by finding something that they use and want to improve. "The sense of accomplishment and wonder you get when you fix your own problems is awesome, and hooks you on open source for life," he says.
