Open Source Project Thoughts

This week I checked three open source projects, Anubis, React and FreeCodeCamp, I realized that maintaining an open source project is not easy. For example, Anubis has a bunch of invalid links in the website, this will make contributors even harder to join the community. As for React and FreeCodeCamp, they have full-time developers to maintain these projects, so they are doing better in this part. As we search for some tools over GitHub, it is a common scenario that we find a relevant repository, but it is no longer maintained, so the repository may have some bugs, or is no longer available. Maintaining an open source project is not that easy, it requires patience and concentration.

Most Excited Point

I think the most excited point of working on an open source project is, you can add your code to part of the famous software. For example, if you contribute to React, then the next time you use React to build a website, your code is part of this, and running on billions of computers around the world.

Big Challenges and How to Overcome

I think one challenge is that some open source projects are not that beginner-friendly. As I searched for the issues labeled “Beginner”, there are only 3 of them are open, and 35 are closed, so this project doesn’t have many issues for beginners, most of them require proficiency of JavaScript. So I think we can switch to some other more beginner-friendly projects, or just hone the coding skills and devote to these harder ones.