Skip to main content

Getting Started with Open Source Projects


Fellow Open-source Enthusiasts



Going to conferences is great , getting inspired by attending them is even better but you know what is better? Getting to attend conferences [National/International] for free , getting cool stickers and t-shirts being delivered at your place , being one of the first few to get your hands on a developer device or developer release of an upcoming software/OS and all this for free! I will hopefully be pardoned by true open-source enthusiasts for making this look like an advertisement rather than a motivator but I somehow couldn't resist. 
Now , ignoring the above perks because they are 'perks' , the real deal is getting to learn while you work. Being involved with any open-source project brings along a great deal of learning , experience and contribution to real-time projects which people around the globe use in their daily lives. Once you are into development and learning , conferences make a whole lot of more sense as you actually get what is going on. :P The best part is you feel the power of innovation, you realize that there is no limit to application but only to innovation. If you can think of it then it can be done.

Caution: If you are getting into this only because of the perks then you are in for disappointment because perks start surfacing many months after you have actually started contributing and developed some respect/relations in the community by having some code to show. If you are in it for the money 
then let me tell you that there is no direct money, it is free work for free software in a free community and hence even the perks are free. You may however become capable enough to get involved in paid stuff like GSOC or some organisation which hires open-source interns like Mozilla. 

Getting involved in an open-source project for you can mean two things: 

1. Start working on a personal idea with help from a community.

2.  Getting involved with a larger community project that operates over the internet 
through an IRC channel and a mailing list.

Prerequisites : 

1. Install any linux based distro like Ubuntu.  http://www.ubuntu.com/ 
You can even use windows but it is frowned upon and it will be difficult to find help.

2. Learn to use IRC for chat. http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/new2irc.html 


4. Short list a few or one organisation which has similar interests as you from the list : 

5. Write an email or catch them on the irc.

Open Advice is a very good book to help you get things in place. http://open-advice.org/

OpenHatch is already famous for getting people started. http://openhatch.org/


PS: You are not required or assumed to have any prior knowledge but only the 
will and motivation to learn and contribute. 

Comments

  1. >1. Install any linux based distro like Ubuntu. http://www.ubuntu.com/
    You can even use windows but it is frowned upon and it will be difficult to find help.
    is mac osx lion fine?or is it that most open source developers use ubuntu(or some other flavor of it) and it is convenient doing the same?

    thanks,
    Narinder S. Ghumman

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MAC OSX is Unix based so you will not run in to as much trouble as you would on windows but it basically depends on what you are trying to do or work on. As a starting point, I would recommend installing any flavor of Linux. Ubuntu is mentioned because it is the most convenient.

      Plus if at later stage in life you mention yourself as an open-source contributor then it would be assumed that you know how to work on the Linux terminal.

      Delete
    2. so, i think i will get ubuntu since that's all over the internet when it comes to open source.
      thanks,

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nouveau - Summer Project

Implementing a software scripting engine on Fermi to achieve safe memory re-clocking. Fermi stands for Nvidia GPUs based on Fermi architecture. NVidia cards have long had the possibility to reclock at least some of the engines of its GPUs. Up to the geforce 7 (included), reclocking used to happen at boot time and usually didn't involve memory reclocking at all. It changed with geforce 8 (nv50) where almost all laptops got the capability to reclock both the VRAM and the main engines. This was introduced in order to lower power consumption when the GPU was mostly idle. The default boot clocks were usually in some intermediate state between the slowest and the fastest clocks. The reclocking process for these cards is mostly understood and Nouveau is not far from being safely reclock on the fly, even while gaming. Geforce 200 (nva3) introduced load-based reclocking on all the cards. This started being a real problem because the default boot clocks are a third to a half of the

uCharts - Financial Charting API

A few months back, the first stable release of the charting API, that I have been working on was released. A part of the uTrade product portfolio, it has been aptly named uCharts. uCharts is a general purpose charting API with prime focus on financial markets and data. In this post, I will give a brief overview of the features, compatibility and scope of extensions. Features The API currently supports 6 types of charts: Line Area CandleStick OHLC Bar Pie It has been designed in a manner that all aspects of the charts are user defined. Starting from the color of the charts, width of the candle bars till the number of ticks on each axis. Mentioning each element seems like a futile exercise. However, brushing over a few notable features seems more fruitful. Aggregation Formula The number of data points that can be displayed on a screen or inside a DIV is limited by its resolution. The number of pixels available can lead to a severe limitation especially