Introduction

If you love to collaborate, discuss and code in a group, then open-source projects are the best way to get exposure to developing communities. It is advised that every programmer should contribute to open source projects to help the community.

Open source has become a respected community of communities that is invaluable to the digital ecosystem. There is a great deal of encouragement towards open-source participation. Every big tech company is investing in open-source in some or another. Such as Google has GSoC, Microsoft owns GitHub, and many more, leading to the development of some great tools and software.

Some of the noteworthy are -

• Android

• Linux

• Swift

• Kotlin

• Tensorflow

• Many More

There are many opportunities in the Open-Source community. You can explore within these communities. You can also get a potential job in big tech companies through open source.

After so much positivity in Open-Source, let's dive deep into the open-source as an absolute beginner.

What is Open Source?

Let's address the elephant in the room that is “What is Open-Source?”.

First, let's get clear about Open-Source Software.

Open-source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open-source software.

-Opensource.org

Open Source Software is not only free but also lets you access its source code. They let you understand the code. You can use the code in your project, can edit the project, and after editing, can distribute under a different license.

If a project is open-source, other developers can contribute to it through platforms like GitHub(I will discuss GitHub in a later part). The idea of helping other developer’s projects is forming an open-source community. This community is growing, helping, and impacting the development of software.

Two words most commonly attached to the open-source community are Git and GitHub. Let’s look at these.

Git

Suppose you are working in a group of developers on a single project. There is an original project file (let's called it master). Each developer has a duplicate copy of the master, and everyone is working on different features. After each developer has completed his work, it's time to add the source code to the master.

If everyone adds the code to master without knowing each other’s code, then there can be an issue such as

• Different structure of code.

• Some features will work, and some won’t.

• Create complexity in the source code.

• If the code isn't backup, then it will hard to roll back changes.

• To solve such a problem, Git comes to rescue the developers.

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficient.
-Git

In Git, version control tracks down every change in any file, which can be easily pushed to master. Since every change is tracked down, it becomes easy to go back to the previous code if there is a bug in the new code; otherwise, there will be a lot of trouble in manually removing code, making it compatible with the previous code again.

With the help of Git, every developer can work on a different branch and, after approval, can merge into master.

GitHub

Git provides control over the source code, and GitHub is a platform which uses git version control to upload open source project to theirs cloud for sharing code to others. Git is local, and GitHub is cloud-based.

GitHub as a platform has helped developers in many ways, such as

• Sharing code with other developers.

• Collaborating with other developers around the world.

• Discussing ideas and features for the project.

• Other people can report an issue.

• Some developers can work on the issue.

• And Many More.

Open Source Projects to Contribute as Beginners

Animation-Nation

Language: CSS, HTML, JavaScript
GithHub Star: 99+

Zero to Mastery is an organization on GitHub that has various repositories for beginner of different languages and level. You can make your very first contribution to one of the repositories of zero to mastery organization. One of my favorite repository is of Animation-Nation, where you can contribute your CSS animation.

30 seconds of code

Language: JavaScript
GitHub Star: 76k+

It has short JavaScript code snippets for development needs. You can look into issue tab for finding some issue that fit your level.

Spacetime

Language: JavaScript
GitHub Stars: 3.4k+

A lightweight javascript timezone library.

Forem

Language: Ruby, JavaScript, HTML
GitHub Stars: 16.8k+

Forem is open source software for building communities. Communities for your peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends, and any other time and space where people need to come together to be part of a collective.

dev.to is hosted on forem.

OKHttp

Language: Java, Kotlin
GitHub Stars: 13.7k+

HTTP is the way modern applications network. It’s how we exchange data & media. Doing HTTP efficiently makes your stuff load faster and saves bandwidth.

Want to Read complete list?

This was a preview of the complete blog post that was created in collaboration with Aviyel. Read all 25 Projects for beginners on Aviyel.

Read Full Post here: Beginners guide to starting your Open Source Journey🗺️

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Aviyel works with open source creators to build and incentivise active communities, achieve financial independence and increase adoption of their projects.

We are building a knowledge sharing platform that offers seamless and guaranteed exchange of knowledge, support and content around open source projects between the open source community and the businesses and developers who build great products using them.