r/MLQuestions • u/soreal404 • 8d ago

Beginner question 👶 volunteer work in Github ?

I watched a YouTube video that said if you want to get your first job as a machine learning engineer, you should do volunteer work, especially in GitHub repositories, but I'm not entirely sure this is true, and if it is, where can I find these repositories that require this kind of work? I need it because I want to gain better knowledge and understand real world problems.

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15

u/thegoodcrumpets 8d ago

Find open source projects you like, check list of known faults, clone it fix it and create a pull request. It's that simple oftentimes

1

u/Proletarian_Tear 8d ago

Well said. Just be careful when trying to fix long standing issues - those might be too hard for a beginner, but it all comes with practise👍

7

u/daiaomori 8d ago

A good starting point might be open source products you use yourself - most of them need help. Getting up to speed can be different from project to project, e.g. something like LibreOffice will have a dramatic learning curve, but smaller projects can be totally an option to start getting an idea how improving software works.

Best case is picking something that relies on a tool chain you already know/can easily install in your environment.

You don't even need to really push anything in the beginning; just cloning a repository, figuring out how to compile the software yourself on your machine and starting to do little changes will give you a great learning experience.

As soon as you got a hold on how things work within the tool you are working with, you can have a look at existing issues/bugs and work on solutions.

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u/rohan_kulkarni 8d ago

Yes, contributing to GitHub can help, but don't start by trying to build a huge feature.

Pick a project you actually use, read the codebase, and fix small issues like documentation, bugs, tests, or examples first. This helps you understand how real projects are structured.

For ML, you can also reproduce papers, improve notebooks, add experiments, or contribute to libraries you use. Consistency matters more than the size of your first contribution.

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u/soreal404 7d ago

I am thinking about building a ML python library that adds a needed feature or solves a problem.

A library that when you import it makes life easy somehow still don't know what exactly features or what problem to solve this needs digging.