Great projects to start with

Here’s a bunch of projects that I feel are very beginner friendly.

ava

A JavaScript test runner that sets up its GitHub issues with good for beginner tags. They seem to be quite conscious of getting more people involved to help them on their Open Source contribution journey.

Contributor Covenant

Contributor Covenant is a code of conduct for open source projects. By signing this code of conduct, the founders of the projects pledge to allow anyone to contribute to their project, regardless of “level of experience, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, or nationality.”

Although this project has less than 1,000 stars on GitHub, its popularity shows by the more than 10,000 open source project maintainers who have signed the pledge, including Swift, Atom, AngularJS, RVM, Mozilla Webmaker, and the .NET Foundation. Contributor Covenant maintainers are currently looking for non-native English speakers willing to translate the pledge into other languages. If this sounds interesting to you, head over to this GitHub issue.

DuckDuckGo’s Instant Answers

For those of you who have never heard of it, DuckDuckGo is a privacy-conscious search engine that doesn’t track users. Instant Answers is a feature that provides answers without needing to open up a website.

Hundreds of people have already contributed to their instant answers, and there are plenty more suggestions on their ideas page.

DuckDuckGo offers good documentation to get you started and to recommend new users by creating cheat sheets. If you want to know what a DuckDuckGo cheat sheets look like, just go to their website and type in “WordPress cheat sheet” to see the cheat sheet. If you get stuck, you can join their Slack channel and check out their wiki on GitHub.

Mozilla projects

There’s no doubt that Mozilla is one of the leading organisations in the world of open source. Contributing to Mozilla projects may not look easy at first glance — maintainers label beginner-friendly issues appropriately, but they’re hard to find because there are so many of them.

Luckily, Mozilla have got your back for new contributors with their site Codetribute. It allows you to search through all of Mozilla’s bug reports to filter them to find the ones that are most relevant to your areas of interest.

Don’t forget to check the good first bug tag on all the issues that are marked as beginner friendly and this handy beginners contributor guide.

Magento 2

One of the biggest e-commerce platforms out there. Magento is tailored mainly to enterprise-level ecommerce businesses.

As an open-source ecommerce platform, Magento requires programming and developer resources which gives you the opportunity to come in and see if there’s anything you can help with.