This year has been fantastic because I contributed to some open-source projects and had my pull request merged on amazing projects with many stars. It helps me to put some green dots on my GitHub profile…

I don’t want to brag about my open source contributions, which are very small compared to what has been done in the open-source community. Instead, I want to show you which open source project you can contribute to during this period. They are not the biggest parties at the festival, but they can train you to drink beers, dress, and dance before attending the most prominent venues.

By contributing to those projects, you can get those green dots on your GitHub profile so that when a recruiter asks you for some sample of your work, you can have something to show them.

But why October?

The reason why I wrote this post today, it’s because we are in October, which is the open-source month. DigitalOcean, in partnership with dev.to, organizes Hacktoberfest. During the most exciting open-source festival, people get the opportunity to contribute to open sources and get some swags and other awards for recognition.

Can you tell us about the venues? :

The venues are on Github. Here are some links with topics and descriptions of each venue I collected for you.

Kratec flask restful cookie-cutter

This project is a cookie-cutter, a template for creating flask applications.

It has a structured way to make flask-restful applications. It is a good starting point for building flask applications. It has some basic features all applications have in common such as token-based authentication and user management system.

It also has all the settings needed for a flask backend, such as database setup, celery configurations, docker-compose, etc.

Tech Stack:

The project is built using Flask and Python 3.6. If you are familiar with that stack, this can be a good start for you.

How You can contribute:

As for all the software projects, this one is not yet completed. It needs some improvements. You can make it PEP8 compliant by setting up linter to make sure it follows all the styles included in pep8. It has some open issues you can look to.

Masakhane :

This is my favorite project; it aims to apply the modern neural machine translation techniques to African languages. With this, we are building the next google translator for African languages. If you are an African, you care for African languages, and you are an NLP enthusiast, I will recommend to look at this project. It has a good opening community. You should join this project.

Tech stack used:

Python, Keras, PyTorch

How to Contribute:

The project is well documented; you can go to this section in the readme; you will find different ways to contribute.

We have a starter notebook, you can grab it, it is self-explanatory, and by running it for your local language, you can have the first benchmark for it.

PyTube :

This is a fantastic tool, and by contributing to it, you will be helping many developers around.From the project readme, you can read that:

PyTube is a very serious, lightweight, dependency-free Python library (and command-line utility) for downloading YouTube Videos.

In simple terms, this project helps you to download a Youtube video or a full Youtube playlist video by providing its URL using python code.

Tech stack used:

Python

How to contribute:

The project is looking for contributors. It has around 30 open issues as of now; you can pick one and start investigating it.I have opened this issue on the project. You can look at it. It is beginner-friendly, and if you have a beginner to intermediate knowledge in Python, you are good to go.

Chatistics

The project name is a concatenation of chat and statistics.It is a python3 project that converts chat logs from various messaging platforms into pandas DataFrames. It can also generate histograms and word clouds from the chat logs.Suppose you are an intermediate python developer who is interested in data, NLP, and text analysis. In that case, this can help you to forge your knowledge in those topics.It can help you find the most active users and get the most topics your friends discuss in a Whatsapp group or a telegram channel.

Tech stack used: Python

How to contribute:

The project has 18 open issues, and you can think about other features you can add. I have opened a issue about a feature some may need. You can look at it.

Speed Rwanda:

A few months ago, a friend of mine Remy Muhire started a twitter thread where Rwandans users could post their internet speed in text format and a screenshot of from fast.com.

We collected more than two hundred tweets from Rwandans.

They shared their network provider, their internet speed (in text and as a screenshot), and some shared their location.

Tech Stack:

Python, Tweepy, Pandas

How to contribute:

There are different ways to contribute to:

suppose you want to dive into optical character recognition. In that case, you can help us get the internet speed from the fast.com network speed screenshot.

If you want to get into data analysis, I have collected many questions you can answer using data visualization or simple pandas queries. You can check the project readme to learn more about it.

If you want to play with regex, you can also help us extract the tweets’ speed.

Pindo

Pindo is the communication platform for humans and machines. It helps to send messages, emails, and text in bulk. It’s similar to Nexmo or Twillo.

Tech Stack:

Python

How to contribute:

The project is actively looking for contributors. If you are a beginner and want to work on a CLI project, you can reach out to Remy Muhire. He can tell you how you can help.

Django-dotenv:

This project is a tool that helps to read .env files in a Django project.

Tech Stack:

Python and Django

How to contribute:

I have opened an issue. You can have a look at it to get started with the project.

Python and Django Conferences website (DjangoConf and EuroPython)

Other projects that can give you exposure are Django conference websites. The projects are written in Python and are maintained with the best Django developers in the world. Working on those projects can give you a kickstart in your Django learning path.

Tech Stack:

Python and Django

How to contribute:

Here is the link to the site also the EuroPython website, you can pick one project and see how you can help.

My Projects

I also have two open-source projects. I always hack on Github. Feel free to have a look at them, balobi nini, nzembo

Tech Stack:

Python, NLTK, Django, and soon Vue Js or React for frontend

How to contribute:

Reach out to me, and I will tell you how you can contribute.

StackOverflow Questions

Another way of contributing to open source is by answering questions on stack overflow. You will be surprised by the number of topics you can learn in a short period. I tried two years ago, and I was surprised by the number of people I have helped on the platform. Even today, people are still coming back to me to ask one or two questions about the answers I put there a long time ago.

Tech Stack:

You decide and choose what is familiar to you.

How to contribute:

I know most of you have never seen the stackOverflow home page; this is the chance to go and see it.

There are always beginners who ask for help. You can filter new questions according to the language and tech stack you are familiar with and provide service to people.

I don’t know how to dress and how to drink. Can you give us some links to get started?

You are not alone, we have all been there looking for how to take our first short. Luckily, we wrote some blogs post on how to get started.
I know someone who gave talks about opens source contributions. I would recommend to check out her @isabelcmdcosta. She wrote an amazing blog on how to overcome blockers while contributing to open sources projects

Here are other resources you can use :

• How to make your first OS contribution
• FAQ about Hacktoberfest
• Mistakes to avoid when contributing to open source
• Open Source guides
• An introduction to open source from digital ocean
• Github issues do and don't
• How to contribute to open source for beginners

How being drunk with pull requests and merge requests will help us?

We know that contributing to open source can play an instrumental role in your tech career. I could write a full blog post explaining its benefits, but that is for next time. And since we got a lot from the open-source community, contributing to open sources is an excellent way to give back to the community.

“YOU received free, give free.” Matthew 10:8

I have a not listed venue. How can I get people joining my stand?

If you have any other open-source project you know a beginner may be interested in, please share it with us.