Open Source Projects that need newbish contributors?

[Stev0]

Been brainstorming for several days in an attempt to come up with a project idea that actually interests me. I've reached the point in my self-taught programming journey that simple things like, "Hello, World", file input/ouput and xml/html parsing just for fun are beginning to bore me, and I'd like to transition to actually writing 'real' code.

So I figured the best way to learn more advanced programming techniques and get to view some actual working code that real people in the world are using would be to get involved in some sort of open source project.

Does anyone know of, or can point me in the direction of some projects that are in need of contributors? Specifically newbish contributors with around 6-9 months experience and just want to get involved helping to find bugs, learn from the main developers, and maybe someday graduate to actually contributing working code to the masses? My experience is specifically in Python with some C# thrown in for good measure, but at this point wouldn't be against learning some additional languages if it meant making something useful and exciting.

Any suggestions?

[matmatmat]

There is quite a few python projects: gwibber, twisted and apparently bzr is very easy to start with. On the C# side of things there is F-Spot and Pinta. This (http://openhatch.org/search/) site may also help

[Stev0]

holy crap, thanks dude, that website is exactly what I was looking for.

[Vox754]

There is quite a few python projects: gwibber, twisted and apparently bzr is very easy to start with. On the C# side of things there is F-Spot and Pinta. This (http://openhatch.org/search/) site may also help

Eh, although http://openhatch.org/search/ may be a good place to start looking for volunteer opportunities, the rest is bad advice. Let me explain.

Projects like gwibber, bzr, F-Spot, are already "mature" projects. They have several developers working on them. Heck, bazaar (bzr) is developed by Canonical itself. It is very unlikely that they need the help from newbies.

What I'm saying is, do not target the big projects, rather concentrate on the small, unknown ones. That way the amount of code and documentation should be manageable by aspiring programmers. Starting on a small project gives you the opportunity to participate in every aspect of programming, writing documentation and packaging, obtaining an overall view of the process. Bigger projects should be easier to undertake with that knowledge.