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Ask HN: Looking for contributors?
225 points by basicallydan on March 7, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 133 comments
There have been times in my life when I've wished that I had a fun side-project to work on, especially in a team, and especially something open-source. There have also been times when I've managed to create for myself a few side-projects which I have loads of plans for but struggle to find time to do all of.

I know there are folks out there who are in one of either of these camps right now, so with that in mind I invite you to 'advertise' your open-source projects in need of a bit of attention from some fellow interested hackers who might want to get involved. Personally, I have two at the moment that I'd like to get more done on.

Ideally, post projects with some open issues on GitHub/BitBucket/Whatever and a few details about the project (language, context, applications of the code). I'll put mine in the comments if it looks like this is useful to anybody.




We love community contributors at Mozilla!

I personally work on Marketplace [1], the app store for open web apps [2]. Our properties run client-side apps (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) with a Python/Django API server. Many other options are available depending on your skills and interests:

- If you know C++, for instance, you can contribute to the core layers of Firefox, Firefox OS, and other Mozilla products.

- If you know JavaScript or HTML/CSS, you can contribute to the front-end of Firefox, or to Gaia, the application layer of Firefox OS.

- If you know Java, you can contribute to Firefox Mobile.

- If you know Python, you can contribute to our web services, including Firefox Sync or Persona.

- If you know Make, shell, Perl, or Python, you can contribute to our build system.

- If you know C, you can contribute to a number of low-level and third-party libraries that we use as part of the Mozilla codebase.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction

http://whatcanidoformozilla.org

Feel free to reach out if you're interested (email in profile), and I'd be happy to either help you find something or put you in touch with somebody who can.

[1] https://marketplace.firefox.com/

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Quickstart/Build/In...


Devtools is also always looking for contributors! We have good first bugs and mentored bugs. Everything is written in web technologies, so if you are already a competent web developer it is fairly easy to start contributing.

Come drop in IRC and say hi :)

https://wiki.mozilla.org/DevTools/Hacking

https://wiki.mozilla.org/DevTools/GetInvolved


Any plans for a Firefox iOS browser? I know UIWebViews use webkit, but I think it'd be pretty cool to have a good Firefox mobile experience on the app store. I primarily use Chrome for iOS, and I think it could be way better.

I develop natively for iOS and would definitely down to help out in any way possible there.


I forget the nitty gritty details, but as I understand it: Apple's restrictions dictating what can and can't go in iOS apps makes it impossible for us to use Gecko on iOS.

Edit: Here is a more thorough answer: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/945460#answer-392...


Question: how is this any different than the scheme Microsoft instituted in the 90s to artificially keep Office and MSIE superior to alternatives? Wasn't it this same regime which ultimately was ruled as anti-competive?


There's a big difference in market share. You need to have a monopoly and abuse that monopoly to violate anti-trust regulations.


Ahh okay, I knew Safari was going to be the end all, be all of performant web browsers using strictly native Objective-C (and it uses webkit too I believe). I notice that you're looking for C++ help above, and was thinking that maybe native mixed with C++ could produce a nice user experience that people would crave on iOS.

Haha I'm kind of just spitballing ideas here - I think not having Chrome sync and Safari sync is a good feature of iOS web browsers in a lot of different use cases. Plus a slim, portable Firefox clone could be pretty interesting to duke it out with those two as well as Dolphin and some other web browsers for the platform.


Make it happen cap'n bennyg!

https://air.mozilla.org/product-design-at-mozilla/

No paid staff are working on this (AFAIK), but this is a pretty good sketch of how this could work in this presentation.


This would be a great addition to the monthly "Who's Hiring" and "Freelancers" posts that go up. Not sure who runs the whoishiring account but maybe they could consider this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring


I agree. Especially if the intro post encouraged a little more standardization like the "who's hiring" one. Maybe request that all posts include at least the tech stack their project uses, for example.


I would really like this. I'm looking for something to contribute to, and threads like this are the ideal place to find projects.


Awesome - you perfectly represent 50% of the people I posted it for. Woo!


Yeah, I agree. I thought maybe in a month's time I'll post it again if they don't. Would be better for a bot like that, though.


Would we be better off with a site to link to that was searchable based on language/project/etc?


http://openhatch.org


http://solvers.io


I would definitely enjoy hearing about active open source projects that need help. I especially appreciate hearing from the people running them, it helps would-be contributors get a sense of each project's current top priorities. I would be a little concerned that big open source projects would always dominate, but that would probably be a high quality problem to deal with at a later point.


You can of course, contribute to KDE.

The community is welcoming, appreciative, understanding and extremely supportive. KDE project includes:

Lots of libraries

Hundreds of applications

An office suite

Different shells (Desktop, Tablet, Media Center)

Lots of artwork, including a complete icon-set, custom font, wallpapers, etc.

You will get experience with real team-work with different people across the globe. Active projects are developed at a very fast pace.

Nice thing about contributing to a project like KDE is that your work will rich millions of users.

More importantly, you are contributing to a community which has an agenda: Free Software.

Take a look at KDE's Junior-Jobs [0]. These are issues which could be easily fixed by newcomers.

[0] https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=junior-jobs&bug_st...


PouchDB - https://github.com/daleharvey/pouchdb

A reimplmentation of CouchDB in the browser based on indexedDB / webSQL, its designed as a library for web devs to build applications that work offline and sync data seamlessly when their users login to other devices.

Theres a contribution guide @ https://github.com/daleharvey/pouchdb/blob/master/CONTRIBUTI... and we try to tag good patches for beginners @ https://github.com/daleharvey/pouchdb/issues?labels=goodfirs...

As a project I spend a lot (pretty much all) my time on trying to make it easy to contribute (while at the same time producing a well built easy to use library), would love to hear back about how easy / insanely hard the process is.


I'm really interested in Couchdb, and have probably spent about 20-25 hours on tutorials so far (and probably another 10-20 perusing the Apache couchdb-dev mailing list archives). Honestly, I don't feel comfortable using it on anything serious yet, though I really want to get there eventually. What level of familiarity with CouchDB + indexedDB&webSQL would you suggest is necessary for a potential contributor?


Hey

Absolutely none, there have been quite a few contributors without prior experience in the related tech, I mean not all contributors are / need to be programmers, trying to make that easier too.

If you are interested then look around this issues, or get in touch on irc or email and certain to find something that you will be comfortable working on.


Tudat: A modular, generic, robust astrodynamics toolbox

http://tudat.tudelft.nl

This project has been my life for the last 4 years. Was fed up with the fact that no one was collaborating within my research group in terms of software, so decided to set this up at the beginning of my PhD. Learned a lot of C++ along the way (and a whole lot more still to learn!).

If you're interested in getting involved, feel free to sign up on the website. There's a stack of features that are still to be implemented, and some fantastic research projects that can be carried out. I've also been looking to implement a Python interface so that the code becomes more accessible (especially to undergrad students in the department).

Some example simulations that have been carried out with Tudat:

* Launcher ascent trajectories

* Interplanetary mission design

* Global trajectory optimization

* Low-thrust trajectory design

* Circumplanetary dust dynamics

* Space debris conjunction analysis

* etc., etc.

So if you want to get your hands dirty with some cool space simulations, we'd love to have you on-board. Feel free to drop me an email if you have any questions about the project: me [AT] kartikkumar [DOT] com.


If this was integrated with Kerbal Space Program my life would be complete


That's sounds like an interesting hack! Do you mean hacking the physics engine for KSP?


Helpful (http://helpful.io). Ruby on Rails helpdesk software trying to make things like ZenDesk & Desk.com suck less. Github: https://github.com/asm-helpful/helpful-web. We've been getting guidance from Kevin Hale (a YC partner) on his vision for the perfect support app. We also do something kind of cool where we share the ownership (and profit) of the app between the contributors: https://assemblymade.com/helpful. Anybody is welcome to be "Helpful" and join the great team that we have building it.


I've found contributing to Helpful to be a great way to play with some fresh technologies and get production code onto GitHub while working with a team. The on-boarding steps and task tracker are excellent, even compared to larger not-for-profit FOSS projects.

- You get to use fresh technologies and learn best practices from some excellent project leads and contributors

- You earn ownership shares of future proceeds from the project

- Your contributions are open source and visible on GitHub—this can mean a lot if you later go to apply to a startup job where "point to a few projects on your GitHub" is more important than "send me a PDF of your resume"

You could do much worse per minute spent on a side project, well worth it in my opinion.


Tox (http://tox.im)

Secure, encrypted, instant messaging, voice, and video, over a distributed network, aiming to be easy enough to use to completely replace Skype.

The core is a library written in C, and there are several different clients in different languages, help on any of them or the core would be great.

https://github.com/naxuroqa/Venom (Vala/GTK+ cross platform client)

https://github.com/stal888/Poison (Objective C OS X client)

https://github.com/Astonex/Antox (Android)

https://github.com/Jman012/Toxicity (iOS)


I recently open-sourced my web-based vector app Mondrian.

https://github.com/artursapek/mondrian

It's a fun project to hack on for anyone interested in math, geometry, SVG, or web apps. You can try it live at http://mondrian.io.

My email is in my HN profile if there are any questions.


Yo Artur, it's Dan (from Hearo way back when). I just happened to be reading these comments, cool to run into you on HN. Mondrian is looking great.


Oy, thanks man. Hope you're doing well


Wow, this is good. I really like the old-school icons, too. Looks like it'd be fun to work on too :)


Looks neat. I'm also commenting here so I can remember to come back to this in a few weeks time!


Nimrod - http://nimrod-lang.org - http://github.com/Araq/Nimrod

Nimrod is a "new" systems programming language which is statically typed, uses space delimited blocks (like Python) and compiles to C to create very fast and dependency free executables.

We have a growing community with a couple of collaborators already who love to help newcomers. There is plenty to do, the most important of which is fixing compiler bugs but I'm certain that most people would not like to start with that. There are of course many other ways you can contribute. You may wish to write libraries in Nimrod and make them available for other Nimrod programmers, you can improve the standard library documentation and the tutorials, or you can simply write software in Nimrod and give us feedback about the language and the compiler.

If you're interested then talk to us on IRC (#nimrod on Freenode) or our forum (http://forum.nimrod-lang.org).


Hi guys,

We've actually build a site you can use to post your projects to attract contributors who can pick up a task for you, join your team, spread word, provide feedback, become beta users or advisors, etc. It works like a GitHub for non-hackers minus the code (since you can use github for the code). The site is used mostly by top universities, hackathons, and some YC and HN members. Here is the link if you think that could be useful to you or others: http://www.doerhub.com


Nice idea. You have to work on your github connection though. I logged in finally through first making a github connection, then it said my email address was already taken, so I got it to work through a password reset. Just so you know!


Thanks! Looking into it!


ShareLaTeX - https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex is a web-based real-time collaborative LaTeX editor.

The stack is a walking cliché: Node.js, Redis, MongoDB, Coffeescript. Lots of open issues, with plenty that are tagged 'good for beginners' (to the project, not necessarily with the tech). We've also got a dev chat room where we're available to help you get started whenever we're online: http://www.hipchat.com/g1nJMcj7b

We have strong opinions about the correct way to write javascript/coffeescript to be unit testable, and how to write apps based on lots of small services which are robust and testable. We'd be delighted to have people contribute and either sway our opinions, or pick up some of our experience.


BrickPi, an open source LEGO robotics system for the Raspberry Pi. We have had some great contributions so far and we really need help. The BrickPi is being used in classrooms but because of our limited programming skills it is still lacking in user friendliness.

The first repo is our main python project. https://github.com/DexterInd/BrickPi_Python. This repo could really use some help with: - Better motor control. Including a robust pid controller for speed. -Vision analysis with the raspberry pi camera (so much potential for robotics!) - A way better way to program with Scratch.

Tufts University is also working on a project called blockytalky that's sort of a souped up hybrid of Google coder and Scratch. The project is mostly in Python and uses a more complex version of daemons to control software and make a really beautiful programming environment for kids! They need some help and their project is here: https://github.com/tufts-LPC/blockytalky.

The hardware is easy to get, its on Sparkfun here https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12732

If hardware is a problem for you send me a pm.


IHaskell - https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell

IHaskell is aiming to be (in a sense) a replacement for GHCi for interactive Haskell development. It uses the IPython framework (no Python code in main codebase, of course) in order to provide an interactive notebook interface. It allows multiline expressions, graphical output for things like JSON, charts, images, etc, and is very extensible. It's more or less stable but there's still a ton to do if anyone is interested - feel free to get in touch!


Crosslet http://sztanko.github.io/crosslet/ needs a fundamental refresh/rewrite. If anyone fancies D3/maps, feel free to contribute. See here: https://github.com/sztanko/crosslet/issues/12


Mate that is a cool-ass widget, really slick! I'd love to help if I can find time. All in favour of reducing dependencies too! I'm currently working on a game which involves leaflet maps so could be some crossover.


Pullup.io - https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup

Pullup is the website you have to submit a pull request to join! We're a small fairly tight-knit community right now. It creates a pretty interesting feel, knowing that every member has an invested interest in how Pullup develops.

We're currently putting a lot of effort into making the onboarding process easier, which means there's a load of easy, yet high-impact, issues sitting in Github right now.

Join us on Gitter, if you want to chat! https://gitter.im/larvalabs/pullup


Prove It! - https://github.com/ConceptPending/proveit

Given the recent spat of insolvent Bitcoin sites, I whipped together a project that will allow any site that holds customer Crypto Currency funds to verify to all customers and the public that they're solvent.

It also allows anyone to host a third-party verification site (work in progress) that will let someone copy/paste some JSON and then explain to the end-user whether they should trust the site they're using and why.

There's a Python and JS implementation, and I'd like to add more languages. I also need to finish the web verification and make sure everything is explained clearly.


We always welcome additional community involvement for any of our projects at Fogbeam Labs. Yes, we're a company and hoping to profit from our OSS work in time, but everything is ALv2 licensed, developed in the open, in true community fashion, not Android style "throw it over the wall" whatever. Code is all on Github.

Most of our code is in Groovy, some stuff is Java. Future stuff might include anything from Clojure or Scala to R, or C++ or Julia.

Quoddy - an enterprise social network. To use an analogy "Facebook for the enterprise" - but so much more. https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy

Neddick - an information discovery platform. To use an analogy, think "Reddit for the enterprise". https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick

Heceta - a search engine. Think Solr + ManifoldCF + (some other stuff for social search and semantic search). You could say the idea here is to bring the Linked Data approach inside the enterprise.

I can't promise anything definite, but as with any commercially backed open source project, the possibility is always open that if somebody contributes to the project and kicks ass, that we may be able to find (or create) a spot for that person at Fogbeam at some point.

All commercial notions aside, we are working on some wicked cool stuff, especially the semantic web stuff, and would welcome anybody who wants to get involved. At worst, we'll all learn some stuff and have some fun together.


Not my own project though related to something I have worked on in the past and would work on in the future :http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/category/html

This is an effort to port science and math sims that were initially built as Java applets but now need to become web-based (HTML5 canvas, SVG, javascript..etc)

I posted a while back asking each developer to adopt a single sim and commit to doing a port on it.

For anyone interested I can get you in touch with folks working on the sims.


This is very cool: http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/resistance-in-a-wire/late...

Do you know how many more sims there are to port?


A LOT: http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/category/new

It is indeed very cool, if they can all be ported to modern web, you can do a lot of cool things with them.

here's an example of some work I did a while back that uses those sims in a digital notebook type environment: http://schoolnotez.com/


There's plenty of room to get involved with Chicago Boss, a web framework for Erlang:

https://github.com/ChicagoBoss/ChicagoBoss


I've got two projects that I'm trying to move forward at the mo:

1. SkiFree.js, my JavaScript port of the Windows classic game SkiFree. Trying to remove the jQuery dependency and flesh out all the features from the original game including additional NPCs. I am actually doing some active work on it every couple of weeks but not as much as I want! https://github.com/basicallydan/skifree.js

2. Interfake, a tool for creating on-the-fly JSON APIs. Really handy for front-end devs, mobile devs and anybody writing automated test suites which need APIs to hit. I'd like to add a way to generate collections in responses (i.e., an array in a response) and semi-random data. https://github.com/basicallydan/interfake

All contributions would be super helpful :)


Hi! I licensed (MIT) all my Ruby on Rails applications. If you're free, I'd appreciate some UX recommendations and PR's!

Compliance chimp - a simple way to manage PCI Compliance https://github.com/akshatpradhan/compliance_chimp

Spoutlets - a simple way to share your journal for your therapist to read https://github.com/akshatpradhan/spoutlets

Lending round - a simple way to manage a small loan to an acquaintance. https://github.com/akshatpradhan/lending-round

My LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/akshatpradhan

Thank you!


We're building a site, http://solvers.io, where you can give your skills to projects that are trying to improve the world.

We've got projects including helping charities with websites, making software to liberate knowledge, contributing to farming robots and helping develop better yielding crops.

I encourage everyone here to post their projects to solvers - we've already brought some really cool teams together.

You're also very welcome to contribute to solvers itself: http://github.com/solvers/solvers


Yes, contributors are definitely welcome on our project! We've got plenty of issues to tackle from simple fixes to big features :) Have a look at the repo or shoot us an email, team@solvers.io


Great idea - I'm looking forward to taking a look at some of these projects.

Your website also looks like it needs a re-design - if you'd like some help with it, let me know.


Hey, thanks! We'd love design help - feel free to drop me a line (richard@solvers.io), or just start taking part on Github.


ClassicUPS: A Useful UPS Library

This is, hands-down, the best and most useful Python wrapper around the UPS API. Use it to track packages, track the status, delivery dates, create shipping labels - everything you'd want to do!

Their API has a ton of features. I could use help with unit tests, documentation, and, of course, adding more useful UPS features to the library itself!

https://github.com/classicspecs/ClassicUPS


Laymans Law - http://laymanslaw.co We are working on making a place to make legislative law searchable, understandable and most importantly discussion oriented to identify laws that need to be changed.

Then we can rally a group to contact the right people to make that change.


http://www.zenphoto.org

We're a nearly 10-year-old open-source self-hosted photo gallery project, with a better backend and design than alternatives like Gallery or coppermine. We also have CMS capabilities like Wordpress, but more geared toward and integrated with your media.

Mostly PHP and web tech. It began very simply and has been run for 8 years exclusively by community contributors. We're about to lose our lead developer, and we'd love to inject some new folks into the project and bring it up to date in terms of UX.

Reach out with an issue/pull request on github if you're interested: http://www.github.com/zenphoto - or via our web site http://www.zenphoto.org


CKAN https://github.com/ckan/ckan is another project looking for new contributors.

It's a Python project, that produces a data portal, used by data.gov, data.gov.uk, dados.gov.br, and quite a few others around the world (see http://ckan.org/instances/ for some more).

You could be part of making the world a more transparent place, enabling people to find (and use) data more easily.

Our contribution guide is at http://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/contributing/index.html. Issues are in GitHub, and we're sometimes about in irc://irc.freenode.net#ckan.

Can you do it, yes CKAN.


There're many issues marked "Good for contribution" now in https://github.com/ckan/ckan/issues?labels=Good+for+Contribu..., which are a good place to start hacking.

It's a Python webapp made in Pylons.


A bunch of projects that could use your help.

Hacker News API - https://github.com/karan/HackerNewsAPI

Fully functional HN API as a Python module. It has a bunch of issues such as adding more end-points for getting more data. I could really use someone's help here.

HNIfy - https://github.com/karan/HNify

This is the REST port of the previously-mentioned API. It has a bunch of issues - not all methods have been ported, no unit tests, very slow sometimes etc. The biggest issue is to add a crawler and a database so the API doesn't have to call HN every time a request is received.

--------------

Both MIT licensed. Free to use and modify. Fork and send PR's, Happy to merge.

Let me know if there are any questions.


BipIO - https://github.com/bipio-server/bipio is all JavaScript, the biggest thing it needs right now is a migration of the configuration dashboard at https://bip.io into the public repo.

Currently a Backbone/LESS/PHP(Zend) stack and needs some CSS consolidation, a decouple from PHP, (most of this is already done), a Gruntjs build system, security audit and general cleanup and also an Apps/plugin framework

oh and there's also Templar (http://mjpearson.github.io/templar/) which could be a whole lot more awesome :D


PureScript (http://purescript.org) is always looking for new contributors.

PureScript is a small strongly, statically typed programming language with expressive types, written in and inspired by Haskell, and compiling to Javascript.

If you're looking for a Haskell project to hack on, or a hands-on way to learn Haskell, we have lots of things to work on. Knowledge of compiler design is not necessary for a lot of the remaining tasks. The goal of the next big milestone will be to write some necessary libraries and to port the compiler to PureScript itself.

Libraries for client-side and server-side web development are also a focus.

The FreeNode #purescript IRC channel is a good place to chat about the implementation.


Amazingly I just set up a blog to try and help with this even more as I was having the exact same urge today!

Please check out http://oss-love.tumblr.com. Would love your thoughts


I'm actually currently starting to look for a co-contributor or two, there is so much that I want to get done, and having an extra set of eyes and hands would be great.

I am working on a framework/concept called ghostream (https://ghostream.com / https://github.com/ghostream/ghostream)

ghostream is a stream processing framework, built in C++ - it is a data stream processing framework. Having used numerous commercial ones (most notably IBM's Streams), and building various other part-frameworks (i.e. for time and budget reasons focussed on one particular thing) I has an itch to build an open source one (while storm and samza are definitely related, I feel they fall into a slightly different category - I'm all about the streams :) )

It is still in very active development - but the base is solidified now and the new test framework is starting to shape up nicely. There are a whole list of issues on github + a roadmap waiting to be exploited.

I have already started dog-fooding it in my other personal projects - the most visual of which can be seen here: http://jamielewis.me.uk/posts/2013-11-03-Mapping-Earthquakes...

If this strikes your interest give me a shout: jamie@ghostream.com.


The glowing bear would be more than happy to be helped out a bit. It's a relay client for WeeChat written in pure client-side JavaScript, for desktop and mobile. You connect directly to your WeeChat (most likely running inside a terminal multiplexer on your server). I like to think of it as IRC for the 21st century.

https://github.com/cormier/glowing-bear Say hi at #glowing-bear on freenode if you're interested


http://factorcode.org/ (https://github.com/slavapestov/factor)

A new programming language based on the concatenative programming paradigm. Not my project, I'm just an enthusiastic contributor. It's the most intelligent and powerful language ever. But a lot of library components are missing and needs to be written. :)


Try Bookie. It's an open source alternative to delicious that I've been hacking on recently. They are registered as a project for Google summer of code this summer so activity has picked up recently, but the main developer struggles to find time to work on it.

https://github.com/bookieio/bookie hosted at https://bmark.us


Teach the world to code with CodeCombat. We're a YC W14 company that open sourced everything back in January. Our game teaches complete newbies JavaScript, but we also offer levels for advanced devs. Our goal is to become the game that teaches everyone to program.

We have a bunch of issues for everyone from senior devs to people who don't know how to program over on our repo: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat

If you are looking for independent projects that won't require as much help from us, you can check out our list of Google Summer of Code example projects: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Summer-Project...

We also just launched a ChallengePost challenge to encourage contributors to submit transpilers so we can make the game available in different languages: http://codecombat.challengepost.com/

If you have any problems or need help, the founders (myself included) spend most of the day helping people get involved in our public Hipchat room: http://www.hipchat.com/g3plnOKqa

Although code submissions are great, the highest value contribution you could make at the moment is to try our first multiplayer level and give us feedback: http://codecombat.com/play/ladder/dungeon-arena


Anyone is more than welcome to help out with some of the projects I have on our even suggest some new ones to collab on. I have a few ideas.

Tyto: http://jh3y.github.io/tyto

Still needs improvement but is a purely html,js, CSS project using a nice simple set up for people to get involved with without trouble.

Also fleshing out a UI component library built with the future in mind.

Hit me up if interested: hey.jhey@live.co.uk


Well, Hacking Health is designed to improve healthcare by inviting technology creators and healthcare professionals to collaborate on realistic, human-centric solutions to front-line problems.

It's a not-for-profit organization with thousand of members world-wide hacking on lots of very cool projects. If you want to be part of it, definitely check it out (hackinghealth.ca).

Whether you want to help your healthcare ecosystem by bringing Hacking Health in your city or want to help the Hacking Health organization (we really need help on the design and development side), please feel free to e-mail me directly: phzbox @ gmail

Some pictures and videos: - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2scn6yHKVo - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llQP92K5fGQ - https://www.facebook.com/HackingHealth - http://www.flickr.com/photos/hackinghealth/


If you're interested in scientific visualisation, you can take a look at Veusz: https://github.com/jeremysanders/veusz

Writing a 3D vector renderer would be very helpful to support 3D plots. Also, adding some extended fitting capabilities or improving the existing data import would be very useful.


It's kind of the "same old" perhaps, but we're working on an open-source internet of things platform. Our background is robotics, so we focus a lot on high bandwidth applications, not just simple sensors, but also algorithms and computer vision.

See: http://dobots.github.io/aim


http://www.javascripture.com - Simple/fast interactive JS API documentation

I started this project a few years ago because I was frustrated with existing JavaScript documentation being too complicated and I wanted a simple way to test out APIs without spinning up a new browser tab/text editor. I finished the basic JavaScript APIs (Array/String/Object/etc) and started adding docs for some more advanced types as I used them myself. Now there are a lot of APIs without descriptions or examples. I would love assistance with filling in missing documentation/examples and possibly translating this site to other languages. If I can get a few people's interest in contributing (here or at http://www.javascripture.com/contribute) I will put the project up on github.


I'm a Hacker Schooler (hackerschool.com) working on two open-source projects in Python and I'd highly appreciate any contributions! The projects are still in the alpha stage, so there's plenty room for creativity and for contributing to the core architecture of them beyond simple bugfixes. Here are the details:

Checkmate (https://github.com/adewes/python-checkmate):

Checkmate is a new Python tool for static code analysis. It provides a global view of code quality in a project and focuses on giving simple, actionable advise to the user.

Blitz-DB (https://github.com/adewes/blitz-db):

Blitz-DB is a file-based document database. It is written in Python and doesn't have any external dependencies.

Help with any of these projects is highly welcome, feel free to e-mail me for more details (andreas.dewes@gmail.com) :)


My project is emphatically beginner-friendly because it's a site for teaching web development.

We have groups of beginners work together to strengthen their skills while they are building the very website from which they are learning. All our meetings and coding sessions are not just open Hangouts but recorded on YouTube as well in case anyone would rather lurk for a while before dipping in. Check it out at http://theodinproject.com.

Also, if you're relatively beginner, a great new site for finding projects is http://agileventures.org. They are an offshoot of the edX SAAS courses and have listed a variety of do-good projects for beginners to hook onto. That site is itself open source. They've got a SCRUM meeting for one of their listed projects going on almost 24/7.


This is rather interesting. I tried launching something similar, with the exact same philosophy in mind.

Would you like to discuss your findings/feedback/success so far?


Unvanquished is looking for developers, modelers, and mappers.

http://www.unvanquished.net/

https://github.com/Unvanquished/

The game is an FPS/RTS hybrid that uses an enhanced engine based off of idtech3 and 4.


I've been looking for some interesting volunteer work for non-profit, open source projects and if we can have this post every month with clear project description, goals, where they need help and how to help. I think it would be very well received by the HN community and would benefit all parties.


JStruct - http://github.com/sebinsua/jstruct

The idea is "JSON as the definition language of JSON transformations."

I'm not at the implementation stage yet, hence the prototype is weak (it might even be broken.)

I came up with the idea and have sketched out a few ways that I can imagine it working, but need to bounce ideas off others before I continue.

Take a look. Conceptually where would you want to go with this? Architecturally how would you get there?

If I can get some contributors it would be awesome. There's quite a bit of deep thought that will need to go into refining how much it tries to handle, what the interfaces look like, and how to make it perform well.

I definitely plan to continue work on it soon, but need two or three heads to do this as well as I believe it deserves.


That is something I have wanted for a long time too. I came from the XML world and am very familiar with XPath. It seems like you are trying to create an XPath type parser for JSON, but also including some more complex features than XPath might include (been a while since I touched it, so I'd have to refresh my memory).

Note that in your README, the links to the github repos for json-path and json-pointer 404.

See also, this: http://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/


Server optimization recipes:

http://tweaked.io/ + https://github.com/skx/tweaked.io/

I've started this and done a reasonably good job, but it would benefit from more content.


Rethink-Scala https://github.com/kclay/rethink-scala

A Scala/Java driver for rethinkdb. Its almost feature complete ,but need to finish the java interpo and clean up a few api. The current branch is for v1.11 of rethink


I'm looking to release Min 2.0, an extremely small (995 bytes) CSS framework, and any help would be very useful. https://github.com/owenversteeg/min

Take a look at the issues for more detail on what would be helpful.


Cylinder (C/Obj-C/Lua) http://github.com/rweichler/cylinder

It's a "tweak" for jailbroken iOS. Basically what it does is it adds animations to the homescreen, like what Android can do.

The cool thing about it is that users can code their own animations in Lua. For example here's a script for cube: http://github.com/rweichler/cylinder/tree/master/tweak/scrip...

It's a relatively simple project. It's pretty popular, had about 50K users at the moment. I kinda wish I had other contributors cause I'm the only one working on it atm.


Just getting Stubby going (https://github.com/jkassemi/stubby) - and it could use some more love.

It's a suite of tools that focus around declarative configuration of various project environments. For instance, the Stubfile.json can contain the references to your staging and production servers, and you can swap your system to view either staging or production from the command line. Additionally it supports stub packages, so you could theoretically write a GitHub API stub (think pre-configured and packaged webmock stubs) and distribute to other devs over github.

My company's building this out to assist with dev/QA and a migration to docker, so there's some semblance of a team.


It isn't my project but OAuthlib needs some help, including Flask-OAuthlib. The contributors there are slow to respond to open issues. OAuthlib is trying to make OAuth1 and OAuth2 easier to implement but the contributors get in the way of accomplishing this when they don't respond promptly to issues.

OAuthlib: https://github.com/idan/oauthlib

Flask-OAuthlib: https://github.com/lepture/flask-oauthlib

Requests-OAuthlib: https://github.com/requests/requests-oauthlib


How will adding people help this situation? You are already saying that contributors get in the way


That probably wasn't the best phrasing, but the point seems to have been that the current contributors can't keep up with new issues (so more contributors might address that).


BackgridJS - http://backgridjs.com/

Backgrid.js is a set of components for building semantic and easily stylable data grid widgets using Backbone.js.

There are a number of features I'd like to implement soon.

- Infinite paging - Fixed header - Column auto-fit - Column resizing - Icicle tree row and cells for multi-dimensional nested data

This project's been around for a little more than 1 year and has already sprung up dozens of different extensions. I look forward to working with whoever is interested in contributing.

Take a look at this ticket if interested:

https://github.com/wyuenho/backgrid/issues/244


If you're looking for something lower-commitment, urllib3 could use an extra pair of eyes or two for code reviews.

urllib3 is probably one of Python's most-installed third-party packages. It powers the core of pip, requests, and many other great libraries who need to do HTTP requests in Python. That's probably millions of developers, altogether. :)

We have new PRs fairly regularly, but this one could use attention right now: https://github.com/shazow/urllib3/pull/326

We've been working on adding more complex Retry configuration support but getting the API and code design just right is tricky. :)


I recently open sourced my github api client. It's written in php and there's still lots of stuff to code: https://github.com/mpscholten/github-api


NaturalNode: https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural an NLP toolkit for javascript. we're always looking for more algorithms and broader language support


1clickBOM: A browser extension that lets you paste directly from spreadsheet to electronic component retailer shopping carts (Digikey, Mouser, etc.).

Works across retailers and internationally. As well as being a useful purchasing tool (in-house so to speak) could help spread OSHW designs and allow users to purchase a "kit" from their local retailer outlets without the designer (who might be on the other end of the world) having the tedious task of filling bags with components and shipping them.

Written in Coffeescript and for Chrome initially. Firefox port is planned.

https://github.com/kasbah/1clickBOM


A team of us are working on the Big Data pipeline for Hadoop and Streaming Technologies.

We are a team of 5 working on it now and looking for other people looking to work on things like Nginx, Yarn/Hadoop, Kafka and Presto

If your interested email me at steve@demandcube.com

https://github.com/DemandCube/NeverwinterDP https://github.com/DemandCube/Sparkngin https://github.com/DemandCube/Scribengin


Higgs is looking for contributors.

Higgs is a JIT compiler for JavaScript targeting x86-64 platforms. The core is written in D, but most of the runtime/libs are written in JS.

You can contribute by testing, suggesting features, submitting PRs with new libraries (graphics, sqlite, etc), more tests, bug-fixes, documentation, and more.

We're very welcoming and will assist anyone wanting to contribute. Come hang out with us in #higgsjs on freenode (heck, come hang out even if you don't want to contribute) or check out the issues on Github:

https://github.com/maximecb/Higgs


turf - geospatial analysis engine written in node.js. The goal is to provide a high level gis scripting api similar to arcpy (but much faster and open source). Anyone interested in maps or stats might find it interesting.

https://github.com/morganherlocker/turf

If you do not have expertise in computational geometry or geospatial analysis:

1) I would be happy to share whatever knowledge I have and tee up a few easier issues to work on

2) Feature requests, testing, design (hoping to get a dedicated site up and running), and help with docs are also extremely valuable.


xBoard: https://github.com/eipark/xboard

xBoard is a canvas based drawing tool like many others - except it can be recorded and played back like video. There are many iPad sketch recorders, but this one works right in your browser.

I originally wrote this in about a week for a college senior project, and haven't been able to give it much love since. I've poked into adding web audio recording with the goal of creating a full Khan-academy like tutorial recorder.

Contact me if you're interested!


Just wanted to let you know that I studied your code couple of months ago. It got me interested in the LZW compression algorithm, which I studied and learned a lot from. Thanks for sharing.


That's great to hear! I don't know much about LZW... I basically just looked up some common compression algs and tried them out. Glad it helped you out though.


:) I've been working on something similar but a desktop version and written in C++.


Myself and a buddy are creating http://sidekicks.io, a platform which allows developers and designers to work with each other on various projects, and in return they gain "karma" to use for work on their own projects that need contributors.

We are accepting sign-ups now and have been able to get some great interest. We will launch the full platform in a few weeks.

Some of our early sign-ups have asked to help build the platform, so they are helping us build it.

If you are interested in contributing let me know!


I am working on LuvvieScript, an Erlang dialect that runs in the browser. The aim is to get a functional run-time and abstraction layer for web pages that talk to Erlang-OTP cluster. Details here http://luvv.ie/mission.html

Early stage project, lots of opportunities to do hard stuff (immutable datastructures in JS, AST-to-AST transpilers, offline-first run times, etc etc)

We're are in the Google Summer Of a Code too, so if you are a student you could get paid over the summer as well...


https://github.com/qq99/echoplexus

Echoplexus is an anonymous, web-based, IRC-like chatting platform that makes its best effort to respect your privacy. It allows you to create public or private channels. You can encrypt your chats. You can secure a pseudonym for linkable anonymity. You can code and draw together in real time. You can make free and secure Peer2Peer video and voice calls with the people in your channel using WebRTC.


If you're interested in graphics, we put together an engine for ascii/unicode raytracing in the browser: https://github.com/trevlovett/AsciiTracer

Demo here: http://trevlovett.github.io/AsciiTracer/asciitracer.html

Some work needs to be done to massage the code into a proper library that could be used for demos & games.


I'd be interested in contributors helping out with my project. It's kind of in a nascent stage, but I have developed a library for streaming from iOS with it.

http://www.github.com/jamesghurley/VideoCore

It's a real-time a/v capture/transform/encode/output library (currently iOS-only, but I want to bring it to other platforms at some point)

It is written in C++ and some Objective-C.


If you are into bioinformatics and know a bit o Jenkins, biouno is looking for more curious contributors - http://biouno.org

Or if you are into QA/Testing, Nestor QA is a test management written in PHP/Laravel, still under development, but we have meeting every two weeks and have some testers helping us to shape the tool http://nestor-qa.org


A group of us HN'ers just started working on a Tinder like site/app for super easy digital BitCoin purchases. Swipe to buy, or swipe to see more. Contributions welcome! https://github.com/lnanek/GumDrop/ https://github.com/archerabi/DigitalMarketPlace


libHN - https://github.com/bennyguitar/libHN

News/YC iOS App - https://github.com/bennyguitar/News-YC---iPhone

The app uses the libHN library for handling all requests/responses to HackerNews and is mostly just a visual representation of the data. Right now it allows logging in, viewing your own submissions, submitting posts, and submitting comments.

---------------

Known Bugs

---------------

Sometimes adding a comment crashes the app. I'm not handling an exception somewhere, I just honestly haven't had time to find it.

The landscape view for submitting posts/comments is terrible from a user experience stand point. I know there's some interesting stuff that can be done with NSAutoLayoutConstraints but I haven't had too much time to mess with this either. I think better keyboard frame management can be accomplished too.

---------------

Additional Features

---------------

I would like the ability to see comments for a user (similar to clicking "threads" at the top). The data request/response part of this needs to happen in libHN, and the user interface can be similar to the CommentsViewController in the app.

I also would like to just go ahead and namespace the app's classes too, either HN or NYC. I like NYC (love it, heh) because HN is used for libHN and I'd kind of like that library to be a separate entity from the actual app.


You can contribute to SwarmESB (ESB type system for node.js) https://github.com/salboaie/swarmESB If you don't know the purpose of ESBs, with SwarmESB you will understand faster because is basically an abstraction on messages, channels, etc. that hides lot of "useless" details that surface in Java ESBs or MOMs.


Pasteye - https://github.com/shayanjm/pasteye is Pastebin Monitoring as a service. Essentially, the more eyes we have on the repo, the better the service becomes. Looking for contributors to push towards v0.2.0 release - where the service becomes 'really' useful. The project roadmap is included in the repo!


Working on an application aimed to make college housing a helluva good time. Stack: Rails Link: https://github.com/mikeadeleke/domimvp New features: https://gist.github.com/mikeadeleke/9406134


If you are into making games, Monogame http://www.monogame.net/ and Duality https://github.com/AdamsLair/duality (very similar to Unity but 2d and OSS) are awesome open source projects to look at.


Monogames URL doesn't seem to work.


wp-varnish - A WordPress plugin for purging Varnish cache when content is published or edited.

A PHP-project I made some years ago, that has some followers. I don't have time for project management on this, but I think the project needs it.

https://github.com/pkhamre/wp-varnish


jsg: generates a dump of all symbols and cross-references from JavaScript source files

https://github.com/sourcegraph/jsg

It uses tern (http://ternjs.net/) to perform static analysis on JavaScript and then outputs it in a format that describes all of the definitions (functions, variables, modules, etc.) and links all names in the source code to the definitions they refer to.

We use it to produce JavaScript docs and examples at Sourcegraph (e.g., https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/joyent/node), but it can also be useful for automatic JavaScript doc generation, automatic bug detection, and other static analysis tasks to improve the quality of your JavaScript code.


Shell Environments

Difficulty: Easy

Language(s): Shell Scripting

In my spare time, I'm working on a set of scripts to be able to create micro-environments in our shell to help better manage environments in the shell when we work on quite a lot of stuff.

https://github.com/sathyamvellal/shenv


A free open source CDN with a lot of interesting and unique features https://github.com/jsdelivr/jsdelivr

Lots of work to be done. You can contribute with coding, design, ideas, feedback...

Sponsored by MaxCDN and CloudFlare


We would welcome contributors at Loomio! It's a simple tool for anyone, anywhere to participate in decisions that affect them. We have a big vision of a more democratic world at every level.

http://www.loomio.org


Might be up your alley: I'm working on a set of free music quizzes. One prototype is up at http://kanyetest.com. If you're interested, feel free to reach out! I'm @dannibles on twitter.


Boost.Compute (https://github.com/kylelutz/compute) is a C++ GPGPU based on OpenCL.

We're always looking for more contributors with knowledge of C++ and an interest in GPU computing.


Ecrire - https://github.com/pothibo/ecrire

A blog engine for those of us that want to write post in HTML. Live preview, per-page CSS/JS, image and partial importer. Check it out!


This can also have a section where some people can post their ideas thats worth getting "opensourced" so that others with time, wish and resources can build that.

This will be helpful for non-tech people or techies who are too swamped with other things.


I love this thread and concur with the others that it should be made a regular occurrence.


Still early in development, but I've been working on an autopilot for quadcopters that uses Python, and the ROS framework.

https://github.com/rospilot/rospilot


CRUDForge: https://github.com/wagnerpinheiro/crudforge

A scafoldding online service for small business and personal use, using Symfony2


Open Hatch lists a number of volunteer opportunities in free and open source software around the world.

https://openhatch.org/search/


Build agents that monitor and act on your behalf. Your agents are standing by!

https://github.com/cantino/huginn

All help greatly appreciated!


Consider contributing to Debian! We've got tons of wicked hackers working on issues on a massive scale. If you're keen on it, feel free to join #debian-mentors on oftc and say hi!


CFWheels - https://github.com/cfwheels/cfwheels

An open source ColdFusion framework inspired by Ruby on Rails


I wouldn't mind some help.

https://github.com/nickfox/GpsTracker

Nick


https://github.com/explore


I'm looking to work with anyone interested in survival analysis.


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