Ask HN: Quit my job for a year to write open source code, what should I work on?

[mindstab]

I've saved up some money and am interested in doing something different for a bit. If I quit my job to work on some open source projects (probably mostly existing, but open to new projects too) what should they be?

[rhc2104]

Would you be interested in making more people contribute to open source code?

Gittip lets people give money to their favorite open source contributors.

https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com

CodeDoor is a way for programmers to leverage their open source contributions to freelance work. (Note: I'm the founder of CodeDoor)

https://github.com/CodeDoor/codedoor

[ilaksh]

I would like to sort of copy Weebly but make the core and all or most of the components totally open source and have a strong index/rating system for sharing and loading components etc. I would write it in ToffeeScript(https://github.com/jiangmiao/toffee-script) using Node.js.

I would also like to make something sort of like a web browser, except its based on a distributed hash table or something so that it is totally data-oriented rather than server-oriented, and instead of HTML and CSS its markdown (with embedded SVG) and optionally RDF (using N3) and optionally a sandboxed Go application that is compiled on the fly. Also the applications aren't restricted to a browser window but have a security system and access similar to that available on mobile.

Or a mesh of user-defined 3d worlds built on WebRTC and WebGL with portals and multidimensional overlays.

[bnb]

Open-source social networking/personal data storage with Tent: https://tent.io/

You can build any type of app you want on top of Tent.

See the hosting provider Cupcake.io to get a working Tent account: https://cupcake.io (say ^bnb.cupcake.is sent you!)

[senthadev → bnb]

This is what I was looking for, data producers control their own data and manage the app providers to use the data..

[bjourne]

I think you should work on Factor: http://factorcode.org/ It's a new and very different programming language that takes about a month of study to learn. After that it will totally blow your mind showing you new and better ways to write software. So embrace Factor and spread the message! :)

[chris_va → bjourne]

Does anyone actually like postfix notation?

[cosmicvibes]

I just saw a post on here about TextBlob - a python natural language processing library. It occurs to me that we need an open source alternative to Google's language processing (as seen on Android and in Google Now). We already have good speech recognition... If I had the chance I'd do that, maybe it'd interest you.

[melling]

Blender: http://www.blender.org/

Just because it seems like a cool project in need of more help. It really does depend on your interests, of course.

[thenomad → melling]

If you're going to do Blender stuff, my vote would be to focus on interoperability with other applications. In particular, Blender needs a working Alembic import/export function, IMO.

[USNetizen]

Play Framework. A very promising framework on the JVM which could supplant Rails/Django at some point with far better performance and robust enterprise features.

[jdorfman]

Ol' Dirty Bashnerds are looking for some help: https://github.com/odb

[senthadev]

Self hosting real time "Commenting" web application with text mining/taming functionality. (A replacement for Disque)

[aba_sababa]

You should help out on Skyline! github.com/etsy/skyline It's a real time anomaly detection system.

[fakenam]

That depends. Why are you going to work on open-source code. Do you have a way of getting paid to do this?

[samspenc]

I would recommend Linux / Ubuntu / OpenOffice / LibreOffice. :)

[utnick]

OpenWhisperSystems is pretty topical with all the NSA stuff going around

[opendomain]

Would you like to work on The Web Platform?

[mikeburrelljr]

Whatever you want! :)

[cowpig]

What are you good at?

[psykovsky]

Bitcoin. That is all.