Open source Python project to contribute to

Question

Until recently, I was a Linux Administrator for a company which went out of business. I don't need money so I don't plan to work for a while.

With all this free time, I'd like to work on my programming skills. Of all the languages I am familiar with I have the most experience with Python. I've searched projects on Github and Sourceforge and have sent a few emails with either no response or a very poor one.

Can anyone recommend an open source project, preferably in Python that I can contribute to? Even if it's just as a tester or something.

I'm not a rockstar developer by any means but I am certain I can be of use to someone's project.

Answer 1

Try twisted, it might be suitable with your current background and should be really challenging as well.

Answer 2

I am (the only) author of two: Chestnut package manager and Wavemol. If you are interested...

Answer 3

This is a duplicate of this question.

Answer 4

I like http://trac.edgewall.org

Answer 5

Django, a popular python webframework.

• http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.2-alpha-1/#what-you-can-do-to-help

Answer 6

Thousand Parsec!

Answer 7

Any. Although what you should mainly be looking for are:

1. How open they are to give committer access, because if you never get your patches submitted you'll be bloody annoyed.
2. If it's something you like to fiddle with, because otherwise you'll get bored.

If I'm going to recommend something that both needs help, is worthy of help, and interesting for many, I'd say Moovida, which although run by commercial interests it is open source, written in Python and looking good, but definitely not really up to scratch yet compared to for example XBMC.

Answer 8

Pygame is in the process of completing its next major version which is a huge rewrite of the previous.

Answer 9

If I recall correctly the GEOS python bindings are unmaintained, so that's a nice (smallish) project you could jump into I suppose. Really nice if you're into geospatial stuff (be aware that there's also shapely on top of the C GEOS library).

Answer 10

If you'd like to improve your python, Bazaar VCS has a number of experienced python developers hacking on it, and I think they generally have a good code-review system. It's also a good example of how to write performant python.

Answer 11

iPython has recently undergone a major architectural change. Many features (like context sensitive auto completer) are yet to be implemented for the new architecture.

The team is awesome and welcoming as well.

It's not really hard; plus you have the old code that you can reference to find how they implemented it earlier. Just port and change to the new API(that is obviously better), and have fun!

Answer 12

You can try mercurial. You will learn about writing performant python application that can run on windows and *nix system.

Answer 13

There are tons of libraries and apps needing conversion from versions 2.x to 3.1. Pick one and have a go at it.

Answer 14

If you're an ex-SA with some time to spare, please, please, pretty please, join the Cobbler developers. It's python, it uses Django (which I like a lot) and it's all about helping other fellow SAs!

There are so many different things to do there, you can either contribute to the core, or write adaptors to interact with other products (Chef for example).

Good thing about it is that it's half programming and half SA project, so you'll feel at home there and unlike just a regular dev most of the problems that this tool tries to solve will be familiar to yourself.