New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Jumping onto the moving train of an active and large OSS project?

Ask HN: Jumping onto the moving train of an active and large OSS project?
4 by ilovecaching | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Looking for both advice and anecdotes on joining well known, large public projects. Some friction points I have discovered and would like to address: - Maintainers already have mature code and are far up the mountain of domain expertise. Playing catchup is hard. - Open work is either too trivial, picked up too quickly by maintainers, or not documented. The, "I wish I had an idea for a feature I could contribute in the first place" problem. - Medium plus sized projects require lots of domain knowledge, which means a new contributor will be slow. Often not able to ask many dumb questions to busy maintainers to unblock oneself. - Putting work out into the public and getting scrutinized by old time maintainers can be daunting. I'm asking, because I've realized that the only time I've successfully onboarded onto a large project has been with physical proximity to a developer and hand holding as I joined a new team driven by corporate interests. I'm interested in learning how to tackle the hard mode of making this jump into maintainership in open source.

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