I strongly believe that one of the best ways to gain experience in hi-tech - even without already working in the field - is to particpate in Open Source projects. There are project in almost every field and you can practice almost every type of job in these projects. Not only programmer, but QA, tester, documentation writer, designer, project manager, support person etc.

I have already created a list of Open Source Desktop applications, and there is also the beginning of the Open Source Web application frameworks and the Ready-made downloadable and deployable Open Source web applications so this time let's see the projects where you can have a direct impact on a live web site.

Live web sites and web applications with editable source code

What I mean here is that the source of the web site is available on some public version control system so anyone can contribute to it. It does not necessarily need to be reusable. In many cases the web sites are very specific and thus their source code is really only relevant for them, but if it is accessible to anyone then we can learn from it and we might even contribute back to it.

In general I think for every Open Source project, if they have a web site, it is usually like this. They are however usually not that interesting as those sites are static.

Many projects have their site hosted on GitHub pages. The source code of GitHub pages itself is not available, but the way the content is generated might be.

  • PyVideo is a static web site hosted on GitHub pages with a small portion, the search engine, hosted elsewhere. It is written in Python using the Pelican static site generator The source of both code and data are available on GitHub.
  • Mattermost a chat system like Slack.
  • Reddit source
  • Wikipedia - PHP - Runs on MediaWiki
  • Libre.fm for developers
  • Read The Docs is the site where you can read the documentation of most of the Python packages you are going to use. It has a page for contributors where you can find the instructions how to get involved. It is using Sphinx, Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and it is hosted on Microsoft Azure
  • MetaCPAN is the central search engine of all the Perl modules, it is also the place where you read the documentation and get meta-data about the modules. It is written in Perl and uses ElasticSearch. It's source is on GitHub See my video.
  • FreeCodeCamp GitHub
  • Exercism GitHub
  • Sqitch has a static site hosted on GitHub pages and genrated using Hugo. source
  • Perl Weekly Challenge source on GitHub
  • Rexify the web site is powered by Statocles, and continuously integrated and deployed to GitHub Pages thanks using TravisCI. Source is publicly available at rexify-website including both code and content.
  • The curl converter can convert any curl command to a number of programming languages. I see Python, Ansible URI, MATLAB, Node.js, R, PHP, Strest, Go, Dart, JSON, Elixir, Rust in the list. You could fix the bugs or start the converter to a new language. Source is on GitHub. The Code is written in JavaScript, and the tests cases are written in the respective languages.
  • codefol.io the blog of Noah Gibbs. Source code on GitHub it uses Middleman static site generator written in Ruby.

My web sites

I know they are not as important for the world as they are to mee, but then again, I can provide more help in case you decide you'd like to contribute.