Learning how to develop a web application in your own corner is challenging, but also lonely. How can you really learn how real web applications are being developed?

Challenging as it is, but it is still relatively easy to learn how to create a web application in Flask, Django, Rails, Dancer, or any of the other popular web frameworks. However there is a lot more to it than just writing the code. Security? Deployment? Maintenance? Upgrade? Caching? Reverse proxy? DNS? Just to name a few aspects.

It is much harder to gain experience on the operations side of a web application, but today, at good companies there is a tight integration between development and operations.

Luckily there are quite a few live web applications (not frameworks!) that you can contribute to.

I'll list a few that came to my mind. I'd love to hear your suggestions. Either as someone who contributed to these or that you wish you did.

Popular projects

• Obviously Forem that is the source code behind DEV.to written in Ruby on Rails. ♦️

• Wordpress written in PHP is open source web application with the largest user-base. I think wordpress.com is not open source, but there are plenty of stand-alone Wordpress installations using the open source code only. source code 🍐

• GitLab that runs GitLab.com and is installed at plenty of corporations. Written in Ruby. source code ♦️

• Phorge is another git hosting platform written in PHP. One installation of it is for FreeBSD another is this one 🍐

• Wikipedia that runs on MediaWiki which is written in PHP. source code 🍐

• MetaCPAN. There are a number of project in the Perl community. This is one of the most interesting ones. source code 🐪

• Zulip an open source alternative to Slack and Discord. Written in Python using Django. Check out their community and source code 🐍

My projects

Maybe less popular, but these are mine 😀:

• PyDigger Python 🐍
• CPAN Digger Perl 🐪
• Ruby Digger Ruby ♦️
• Kantoniko Python 🐍, JavaScript
• OSDC and the Open Source Organizations Python 🐍