Simple/uncomplicated open source projects?

Dave!

Hey folks,

I'm interested in getting involved in some open source developing. My programming skills are good, but not great. I've only really done projects in college, and they weren't particularly complicated. I'm sure that getting involved in OS would be very helpful and would help me improve my skills.

I've glanced at code from a few projects, and they are really overwhelming, and totally not what I'm used to seeing, as my projects required just a few classes! I don't really know where to start when looking at a project

Languages I have some familiarity with:
-Java
-C++
-PHP

Can ye recommend some projects that I could start off looking at with any of them? Java in particular, as I'm most comfortable with that.

And more generally, any guides or tutorials for a beginner looking to get started in OS development?

Cheers!

Naikon

Bug fixing. Work your way up from here, become the maintainer of the project, then decide what uber new feature you will implement. What you are trying to do is akin to being thrown into the amazon.

You need time to just learn your way around the codebase. You CANNOT just jump into a project and expect to be doing great work in no time. I don't know what to say about college, apart from the fact that there is a BIG disconnect between industry and college work. Sure, learn a bit of Java, that will prepare you for everything!!!.

croo

That's good advice from Naikon.
And you might even look at bugs that are fixed in the latest version. Try to find the issue in the last release yourself then look at how it was resolved in the project.

Also, pick just one small aspect of the project that interests you to begin with and specialize in it first.

And lastly, have patience. Depending on the project it can take a long time to become proficient... there is one project I work on that took me the guts of a year to understand the whole application fully!

conor.hogan.2

I recently looked at the libreoffice source code, scared the crap out of me. Not even sure where to start, I presume one would have to use their git/svn when fixing bugs?

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks#Preamble - that looks like a good place to start.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43649/how-to-get-involved-in-an-open-source-project

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ExampleHowToContributeAPatchToAnOpenSourceProjectLikeDasBlog.aspx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w15pymy84r4

tadcan

LibreOffice is the opposite of simple/uncomplicated. Years of complex code, layers of crust, means that would be jumping in the deepend.

conor.hogan.2

True.
But you choose an area and not pay to much attention to the whole?

Naikon

I find this website is good as a portal for bug fixing/larger projects: http://openhatch.org/

Steveire

Get started with KDE here: http://techbase.kde.org/

It helps if you use it of course.

daymobrew

Sourceforge.net hosts over 260,000 open source projects.

You can browse the Help Wanted section (I found a PHP role there a few years ago) or find a project that is of interest to you and see if they have bugs that need fixing.