DPS909/OSD600 Winter 2019 Lab 3
Discovering Open Source Projects
Due Date
Friday Feb 8.
Requirements
- Research 3 potential open source projects on GitHub you might like to work on
- Blog about your chosen projects, and why you chose them
- Add your Name and URLs to the table at the end of this lab
Contributing starts with you
During the remainder of the course, we'll be contributing to real open source projects, most of them on GitHub. Before we can add new features or fix bugs, we need to find possible projects.
Picking a project to work on involves first answering some questions about yourself:
- which programming languages, and technology stacks do I like to work in?
- which programming languages, and technology stacks would I be interested in learning?
- what sorts of programs, systems, technologies interest me?
For example, you might be strong in web technologies, and interested in learning more about Python. Similarly, you might love working with data, and want to learn more about data science, machine learning, or visualization.
Someone else might love low-level programming, and want to find something related to C/C++ and embedded devices.
Yet another person might be interested in Java and Android development.
Write a short profile about yourself in this post, and try to figure out what you should look for, and what you should avoid.
Look for projects that match your profile
There are literally millions of open source projects you can work on. Use your profile above to narrow your search a bit.
Find 3 potential projects that you'd like to work on during the course. Here are some links to get you started:
- Popular, Trending repos on GitHub. You can further limit your search per language, for example Trending JavaScript repos in the last day
- GitHub's Explore page. This gives lists (some curated, some extracted via keywords) of projects.
- GitHub Topics. Here you can browse through projects keyed by topic.
- Awesome For Beginners. A list of open source projects that are known to be beginner friendly
- The really big list of really interesting Open Source projects
Also, talk to other students. Many students have worked on open source projects at Seneca. Ask them what they liked doing.
Write about your chosen projects
Write a blog post about the projects you found:
- What is the project?
- What are some important links (website, github repo, docs, etc)
- Why did you choose it?
- What would you like to do with the project?
- What would you need to learn?
Write about these projects in connection with your own personal profile of skills and interests.