What would you suggest for finding a project that is sufficiently complex to matter, but not too large for a student to contribute to?

Not "extremely well known," but our startup has released open source developer SDKs (currently Android and Arduino) and example apps for our consumer hardware device (haptic wristband). It's just been me and a colleague working on these in our spare cycles.

https://github.com/neosensory

We'll take any help we can get with contributing to any of the projects posted up there.

To the original poster .....

If you are being welcomed in to this project then you should take up the offer and then do some serious hard work fixing every possible issue you can in the github issues and asking guidance from the project maintainers as much as you can when you get stuck.

Unpaid internships are the best indeed

This looks really cool. What are some ways to contribute without owning a wristband, specifically to any of the Java-based apps? Thanks!

Any sort of code review, basic testing on different systems/OSes, or clean-up (whether in code or documentation) is welcome. Some of the libraries for Satellite-tracking etc. are actually agnostic of requiring a wristband. The apps can generally be run / partially tested without needing to connect to a band.

Pick a project that you already use yourself. You'll have a lot more context and will be much less likely to just give up at the first problem you run across.

You should check out projects made for Deno[1]. It's a new promising. It's like Node, but it runs TypeScript natively. One thing that will dictate the success of this project is if the community can migrate Node's ecosystem into Deno. There's plenty of projects being built for Deno.

[1]: https://deno.land/

Check code triage site

Pick one where someone actually reviews PRs and there isn't hundreds of them sitting open from months ago

What programming technologies are you fascinated by, really interested in and love?

Answer that and then I'll suggest projects.

Good/decent with Python, Java, Go. Not a fan of front-end web, unfortunately. Really intrigued by Go the most, and am into back end server work, and would _like_ to learn systems level stuff but need to learn/read a lot more before that.

Thanks!

search google for "biggest golang open source projects".

notice the number of github stars on these projects: https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/golang

https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/82m6zq/open_source_...

https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/golang

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3442978/10-open-source-pro...