Hello, everyone.
So, I have an idea for an open source project, but have absolutely no idea where to start.
Can someone plese guide me as to where to begin? Who do I contact? Etc. Any info would be much appreciated.
Umm… Did I just describe github? O_o
Any experience with github? You can just make a repo and find people who want to contribute.
I know @JacksonBates has experience with setting this up. You could have a look at his repo.
I’ve messed around a bit, but nothing to be taken serious. I definitely need to get a better grasp of it though. Also, thanks for the reference, and I’ll check it out now.
It helps to have something created that you can show people. There are roughly 100,000,000 “ideas” out there for every developer, and no one wants to invest their time to create someone else’s project from scratch. Once you have planted the seed with your own effort, you can post a repository and create issues in Github. An issue is just the way Github lets you track what needs to be done in your project, and you can add tags like help-wanted for issues you don’t know how to handle. The benefit here is that people can (and do) search Github for unresolved issues that they can work on. There are even sites like up-for-grabs that automatically search for and display issues.
If you can’t even start the project, then you can ask around online communities for people who want to contribute right away. Seek out local hacker clubs, join up, make friends, and then bring up your project idea. If it interests people, then you’ll find contributors. However, expect to do most of the work yourself in the beginning. Find out what you need to learn in order to get started, and then learn it.
Besides what was already said, do a thorough search. It’s quite likely what you want to build already exists and maybe just needs some extra love or tweaking for it to also work for your use case. Nobody wants the 100,001th text editor, music player or irc bot.
I am a fledgling front-end dev but I am willing to help code and learn in the process if you are looking for contributors. You do plan on doing it on github right?
Thanks for your reply. It definitely contains a lot of helpful information.
I indeed went through with it, and started working on it a few minutes after creating this thread. I also created a repository, and will be exploring github profusely. I’m not sure if what I’m creating already exists - I should probably check that right now.
It exists, of course sigh, haha.
While working on a new portfolio, I was having difficulties with making it responsive. So I thought: it might be cool if you can just upload your HTML/CSS somewhere, and it points out the changes you need to make for a website to be responsive, kind of like jslint. Thus, this thread.
I’m still going to attempt to create this, without even looking at the other ones.
EDIT: Should I not have created a repo yet, with just some basic HTML/CSS, or do you think I should have waited to be at least somewhat-finished?
If there’s no code, nobody can help you. So if you care about that, since a user already volunteered, releasing early and planning together sounds better than sitting on it.
Hey, @nasteho28, I apologize for the late reply!
Anyway, I wrote a summary of what the project was that I had in mind in reply to @PortableStick.
Would you be interested in that type of project?