Find an Open Source Project to Contribute To

nickjoedaly — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 01:25:36 +0000

1) How to label your projects so people can find them, and,
2) how to find projects you wish to contribute to (via a mini walk through the search process.)

Hey everyone. First timer here. I was looking through github to try to find a #hacktoberfest project to contribute to and found myself unable to search for multiple topics simultaneously. Seemed like a big deal to me considering this is the month to get projects noticed and, as a newbie, I cared more about finding topics or causes that really excited me more so than searching by task/bug.

What I learned:

Your quickest bet for searching for projects within #hacktoberfest2018 is simply to go to the topic page and then enter a search query in the search bar such as #music. The autopoulated dropdown in the searchbar will give you the option to search 'in this topic'. This is a quick workaround and will save hours of time browsing for issues and causes and then trying to see if they are tagged and participating in #hacktoberfest2018. This brings about my call to action: please generously tag your hacktoberfest2018 projects with other in order to help people contribute to projects

(Aside- this all took place at a live meetup during which even one of the coordinators had the same issue and didn't know how to search topically)

This raises multiple questions:

1) How can github refine their search function to be more intuitive for searching multiple topic searches without going into an advanced search?

2) What is an intuitive way to refine a search query on github?

3) What other basic functionalities are currently obstacles to participation in #hacktoberfest2018 for non-tech-savvy contributors?

Hope that gets the ball rolling about optimizing search functionality for more human use.

Thanks.
-Nick

Forem: nickjoedaly

Find an Open Source Project to Contribute To