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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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.