Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Julien Dubois, creator and maintainer of the JHipster open source project.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?
JHipster is a development platform, mostly aimed at Java developers who want to build a fullstack application. So we're creating the backend, with Spring Boot or Quarkus, we create the frontend, with Angular, React, Vue.js, and we create the infrastructure around it to build and deploy your application.

What contributions are you welcoming?
We're looking for a lot of contributions! Today we have more than 600 contributors in the main project, we have forks - and what we call blueprints - in other languages, we don't only do Java. We got lots of .NET and Node.js. We look for a lot of different competencies for all those different projects. We also need people with design and communication skills - what we lack today for example are good logos (visuals). We have a few, but we'd like more. We need better docs, better videos, tutorials. We are not only looking for technical expertise, we're looking for a wide array of skills. Everybody is welcome to the project. We have a long history of welcoming new people, new developers new to coding. JHipster is quite big today, with a lot of people, which might be a bit stressful to newcomers, but we're genuinely happy with new people joining us.

What skills do people need to contribute?
The most important skill is to be nice. And curious. We have many people joining the project as trainees, or who were not developers, and they grew with the project, and made it what it is today! If you're happy to work together, we're happy to have you. We're not looking for somebody already extremely good at something. That's something you can learn. We're looking for someone who can communicate well, and wants to work with us as a community. JHipster is maybe more a community than it is a technical project, and that's what makes it work!

How do I get started?
To get started, we got a lot tutorials, guides, videos, and more classical documentation as part of contributions from the community. And maybe you'll want to start a project of your own - we got this page start.jhipster.tech where you can generate JHipster applications, with no installation required! You might not understand all that's happing right away, but that's fine! You'll learn by having a look at what's been generated. Once you get familiar with the code I'm sure you will want to contribute back because you'll see that some default does not feel right for you, or it's not well-documented. That's the point where you tell us how you'd like to see it implemented!

Some more links:

• JHipster tutorials: jhipster.tech/
• Community support: jhipster.tech/help/
• Project repository: github.com/jhipster

Join, October 2nd, for CONTRIBUTING.md - a virtual Hacktoberfest meetup, free and open for anyone who wants to join. Learn what Open Source projects are looking for contributions, which communities are looking for new members, and who is looking for advice from someone with your exact skill set. Check this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers which we'll release until the event.