Good Ways To Join an Open Source Project?

Tathagata asks: "I'm a student, on my final year in a college in India, and I have been using GNU/Linux for quite sometime now. Though I'm from a Computer Science background, getting into a project that involves serious programming was not possible, as people (read teachers) run away if you utter the word 'Linux'. They are generally not bothered about mentoring someone on an exciting project, and they would suggest you to get settled with Visual Basic, .NET, — and would prefer a 24 hour solution when it comes to programming. So, my programming endeavors have remained limited to writing few lines of C/C++, or Java. For last few days, I've been googling, and trying to read how to join an existing Open Source project." What suggestions would you pass along to someone who is willing to join his first Open Source effort? Most of the things I've read suggest that a good place to start is by submitting patches, fixing bugs, becoming package maintainer — but most are overloaded with jargon like upstream/downstream, nightly builds, and so forth. Additionally, how does joining the mailing list, or the IRC channel help when you don't even understand the slang, not to mention the intricacies of the technical discussion? It 's quite an overwhelming world to step in. Could you suggest a road map, links to essential tools or a few projects, for people like me, who would want to improve their skills by contributing FOSS?"

Comments

ECK

[Billly Gates]

No you can not write any reasonable piece of software for business in 24 hours??

Are your lecturers or professors professional programmers? Don't they have any experience in the real world? Or did they learn how to teach by getting their cs degree in mathmatics and read one "learn vb.net in 24 hours!" books that somehow makes them an expert to teach it?

3 months is what is used here in the US for quality projects written in C++ using business objects or vb.

I learned java from an instructor who worked at Bell Labs during the 80's. He actually learned OOP from Bourne Strastop. Basically it takes awhile to do any real Object Oriented work and specifying requirements before any real code is written. Not bad from a community college.

Any solution done in 24 hours is simplistic and very very poorly written and does not meet requirements for the project.