How to Find Open Source Projects for Beginners

I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things. - Linus Torvalds

Contributing to open source can be both rewarding and satisfying. It helps you improve your skills, build meaningful connections, and also build your career.

But having that first contribution can be a daunting task to you as a developer who has never contributed to open source before. I’ve compiled a list of some great platforms that help beginner developers find great open source projects and issues to make their first contribution.

But before starting, if you don’t know what open source is - Read this post

10 Platforms to Find Open Source Projects for Beginners

1. Open Source Guides

Before starting open source, it’s always good to know how to contribute to an open-source project.

Open Source Guides is like a 101 for open-source. This website has guides on 👇 (list below was taken directly from their website)

• how to contribute to open source
• starting an open-source project
• finding users for your project
• building welcoming communities
• best practices for maintainers
• leadership and governance
• getting paid for open source work
• your code of conduct
• open-source metrics
• the legal side of open source

I will highly encourage you to give it a read before making your first pull request. It’ll enlighten you on Open Source and various other elements involved in it.

2. Up For Grabs

Up For Grabs maintains a “list of open source projects which have curated tasks specifically for new contributors.” (from Up For Grabs)

Filter the projects by labels and tags and check the projects which you find interesting. 

3. Ovio Projects

“Ovio is a community platform striving to make the open-source ecosystem more collaborative and accessible by empowering developers to contribute.” (from Ovio)

It gives you access to the curated lists of projects and issues that match your skills and interests.

You have to first create your account and fill your profile to let Ovio know about your skills and interests based on which they will auto-match you with projects and issues.

4. CodeTriage

CodeTriage helps you contribute to open source by “picking a handful of open issues and delivering them directly to your inbox”. (from CodeTriage)

After you sign up for CodeTriage, you pick the repos you want to help with, and they will periodically send you issues. They have already helped 63,488 developers contribute to 6,767 Open Source projects to date.

5. First Contributions

First Contributions helps you make your first open-source contribution in five minutes. To get started, you have to clone their repository locally and then add your name to their ”Contributors.md” file and then push the changes to GitHub. Once you have done that you can check their extensive list of projects and choose the ones which match your skills and interests.

6. Codetribute

“Codetribute is a site that guides contributors to their first contribution. It helps new contributors find a project they want to work with, learn about that project, and then find a task that is suitable to their skills and interests and not already assigned to someone else.” (from Codetribute README)

You can browse projects and their issues and can also filter issues based on your preferred programming languages. The other good thing about Codetribute is that it lets you find issues with good-first-bugs tag unlike other resources in this article.

7. Hacktoberfest Projects

Hacktoberfest Projects is a website that lets you find eligible projects for Hacktoberfest. Though this website is specifically designed to find Hacktoberfest projects, there’s no rule that you cannot contribute to those projects in other months apart from October. 

So check out this site and you may find some great projects here.

8. Good First Issue

Good First Issue website curates the issues with good first issue tag from various open-source projects and displays them with a nice and clean UI. It’s a great way to find "good first issues" on GitHub which would manually take you a long long time to find. If you're a beginner, I would encourage you more to visit and check this website.

9. First Pull Request

To be honest, this website might not find you open-source projects for contribution but it'll tell you what was the first open-source contribution of your favorite programmers.

First Pull Request as the name suggest asks you the GitHub username of your favorite programmers and in return displays their first pull request.

It's a great website for you to know how many giant programmers you know of started with small contributions.

10. Aviyel

Aviyel is a community-driven monetization platform for open-source projects. They work with open source creators to build and incentivise active communities, achieve financial independence and increase adoption of their projects.

Aviyel is “building a knowledge-sharing platform that offers seamless and guaranteed exchange of knowledge, support, and content around open source projects between the open-source community and the businesses and developers who build great products using them.” (from the Aviyel Manifesto)

Currently, they have onboarded five projects - Docz, Typesense, Mobile Security Framework(MobSF), Chatwoot, and Hoppscotch, you can check them at Aviyel’s website.

Check out the platform and these projects and you may find something interesting.

Parting Thoughts

If you are reading up to this point, chances are you are really serious about getting involved in open source. I wish you good luck with your open source journey. Reach out to me on Twitter if any of these platforms now or in the future help you make your first open-source contribution. I would love to hear about your journey.

Happy Coding!