Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Aim to be a real free software engineer

[Bob Proulx]

Hello Aisuko,

Aisuko LI wrote:
> Thanks for your sharing. I'd like to contribute to the community as I
> personally like to contribute to the operation system or microKernel. But I
> do not know which project I can take with my past experiences. I was
> tracking some issues these days, but may not be easy to jump in. So, would
> you mind sharing some advice with me?

First, Let me post the official reference page that everyone should
read.  It's better written than anything I might type in quickly.

    https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html

And perhaps especially this one. 

    https://www.gnu.org/software/tasklist/howto-volunteer.html

Second, Let me say that the best places to contribute are to projects
that you are using yourself.  Projects that you feel an attachment.
Projects for which you feel passion.  Those are the best.  Much better
than something that I might just point to and say, this bug here, go
fix that bug, in something you have never heard of before.

There are a lot of good ideas in the howto-volunteer page above.  I
don't want to repeat it.  But that is what I would like to say here.

And remember that contributing is about everything.  It's about code.
It's about documentation.  It's about translations.  It's about web
pages.  It's about mailing lists.  It's about IRC.  It's about
triaging bug reports.  It's about coordinating.  It's about helping
others.  Perhaps most importantly it is about helping others!

What are you interested in?  I know in your introduction you mentioned
many things that I am not familiar with myself.  That makes it hard
for me to suggest something since I know so little myself.  But I did
see that you listed several "cloud computing" topics.  (But see
<https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid#CloudComputing> as to
the problem with that term.  It mostly means someone else's computer.)

Also note that there are only a very few people on this
savannah-hackers-public mailing list as it is primarily dedicated to
discussion about the Savannah software forge.  For example if you were
interested in working on GNU Guix then help-guix@gnu.org would be the
very active place for discussion about all things Guix.  So far you
haven't mentioned the Savannah software forge itself but here is where
we talk about it.  For example if you were interested in Emacs then
the help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org mailing list is a good place to start.  For
example if you were interested in Jami then jami@gnu.org is the place
for it.  And so on and so on and so on for all of the many, many, many
packages of the GNU Project.

I suggest wandering around a little and seeing what interests you! :-)

Bob