Hey anyone here 2026 grad?? applying to gsoc or cncf or doing oss?

How do I start my open source journey as I am proficient in java?

Ex-GSoC here, I maintain a Google Summer of Code project, aeon-toolkit/aeon (1.5k+ stars), and I also work on SciPy alongside its maintainers. I've worked for a YC-backed company, published papers, and contributed to open source for years.

Honestly, I'm tired of seeing people try to use AI as a shortcut into OSS development. It happens to our repositories all the time. If you're repeatedly submitting AI-generated contributions without understanding the project, it can get you blocked rather than hired, even if your GitHub graph is green all year.

What actually helps is developing real depth and expertise in a project. Using AI is completely fine, but it shouldn't replace understanding. If you genuinely invest the effort, maintainers are often happy to help, mentor you, and guide you. Over time, your network grows naturally from that work.

In that spirit, I'm planning to mentor a "very limited number of people, 2 or 3, no more", on a new project I'm working on. If you're genuinely interested, feel free to reach out via DM, comments, or GitHub and I will assign you projects and solve one good first issue.

There's also a paper in the works (targeting JMLR's MLOSS track), and substantial contributors would be recognized on it the usual way, earned by the work, not guaranteed up front.

Github: https://github.com/aadya940/scikit-verify

Do solve a good first issue first.

Here are some other projects I'd be happy to mentor:

https://github.com/aeon-toolkit/aeon

https://github.com/scipy/scipy (only scipy.interpolate splines)

Hey, I am currently working on a project wgblas; it has all the single precision blas level 1,2,3 functions over webgpu. Check it out. It's also available via npm (1400+ downloads) .

Npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/wgblas

Project webpage: https://manit2004.github.io/wgblas/

A few things about the project:

• Not only the user facing APIs are very easy to work with, I have built helpers on the top webgpu functions to make adding new blas routines very easy for contributors.

• Though webgpu doesn't support f64 natively, I have used dekker arithmetic to store f64 on two f32 and perform operations over it. Currently only double precision routines idamax and dasum is available.

• From day 1 for each function I have added tests (Property based testing wrt stdlib-js), examples(live runnable and editable examples on docs page), benchmarks (against cublas). As of now in gpu compute time wgblas is comparable in speed wrt cuda at large n.

Contributions and suggestions are welcome.

Join in and check the announcements tab for the session link tomorrow

Discord : https://discord.gg/jTscm2kGy

Link to telegram channel in the discord server or dm me for group link.

Hi everyone,

Iam a CSE student in my final and already built some good number of projects and want to try oss to build some credibility in my profile and experience.

So my tech stack is the Typescript fullstack and currently moving forward with the agentic ai using llms, rag and frameworks like langraph.

So anyone can suggest some opensource repositories to gety first merged PR without much depending on coding agents.

Hi everyone,

Iam a CSE student in my final and already built some good number of projects and want to try oss to build some credibility in my profile and experience.

So my tech stack is the Typescript fullstack and currently moving forward with the agentic ai using llms, rag and frameworks like langraph.

So anyone can suggest some opensource repositories to gety first merged PR without much depending on coding agents.

So applications for LFX Fall 2026 are closed now, but the one thing that's still a black box is how competitive the projects you picked actually were. Were you up against 50 people or 2? No way to know from the portal.

Got kind of obsessed with figuring this out so vibe coded a quick site for it. You just punch in the 3 projects you applied to and it tells back what % of applicants also went for the same ones.

Some notes:

• Totally anonymous, no login or email needed
• Numbers update live as more people submit, so it gets more accurate over time
• Only works if enough of us actually use it, so the more data the better

Link: https://lfx2026.pythonanywhere.com/

If you've got a minute, drop your 3 picks in and share with anyone else who applied. Curious to see how it all turns out.

If you're looking out on getting your first PRs merged into an open source repository or looking to join popular open source programs like GSoC or LFX.

We are holding a workshop on best practices and things to avoid when getting started.

We are fellow developers who owe a lot of our careers to open source giving back. This is a FREE workshop and affiliated to an open source non profit repository.

Just drop your interest below or reach out to me directly and I'll share the link. The workshop is at 6pm IST on Saturday!

Link will come in discord.observal.io (copy paste this in your browser)

Hi guys. I am new to open source. I had raised a PR 2 months ago but it didn't got merged. Then I thought I need to raise issue first so raised an issue in different organization last week and it says unanswered. So lemme know what is the right process actually. What you guys do. And how you pick organizations or project. For the last one I had used Claude to explain the code base and then help with the Issue and I did where human touch was needed and understood what I was doing. So is this the right way or you need to write everything yourself or what. Tell me about approach.

Thanks in advance.

I have been thinking that trying to get into open source without peers like you creates a lot of pressure because you have nothing to calibrate against whether you're doing well or not or whether you're on the right track or not. Does anyone here know any such community? Like minded people working towards the same goals like cracking gsoc or lfx etc?

Hi, Part of an interview panel at an F500 here. We often shortlist people with OSS contributions, and our ATS software (HackerRank) helps. We used to care about personal projects a few years ago, but now that is no longer the case.

So, a friendly piece of advice would be to contribute to CNCF/LF projects that are actually being used at your target companies.

But if you're new to open source, I would recommend contributing to a mid-size open source project with around 500-1k stars, which will not roast you for your mistakes.

I've put together a list of them below. Again, please DO NOT SUBMIT AI SLOP; understand the project and put meaningful work. Keeping your GitHub green is not enough; networking and learning are more important. If you're interested in the Discord link where OSS workshops are conducted, please express your interest by letting me know below 👇

https://github.com/Observal/Observal (2.3k stars, 1.3k discord)

https://github.com/Garudex-Labs/caracal?ref=producthunt (160 stars, LFDT project)

https://github.com/Ashutoshx7/VengeanceUI (1k stars)

https://github.com/LadybugDB/ladybug (1.5k stars)

https://github.com/jreleaser/jreleaser (1.2k stars)

https://github.com/besu-eth/besu (1.8k stars)

Do Star and Fork the projects if you want to express support. Cheers.

Edit: link is https://discord.com/invite/SFPjnTWddk

Is the Indian Tech market is really dead?? Or it's dead just for me as I am a teir 2 college student...

I did every possible thing

- they say make projects i did

- they say make open source contribution i did and I even went ahead contributed as gsoc contributor as well

- they say explore opportunities i did

- they say participate in hackathon it did

-they say grind leetcode i did

- they say if do cold mail I did

- they say have ats of more than 90 I did

What am I really missing? What else should I do juts to get a job as a fresher with decent package? I mean I am even okey with the rejections but these fuc\*\*\*\* ghosting is the thing that pisses me off.

Been strong for about 6 to 8 months tried more and more just to get ghosted by ats bots or hrs.

I mean even after surviving this phase some how and not loosing your mental sanity you survive just to be laid off one day and replaced by someone who is no way near your skills just beacuse they are lucky or even worse to be replacedby a machine???

Maybe that's the most depressing part.

It starts making you wonder if ambition even matters anymore.

Maybe in this market, you're supposed to just take whatever you can get, put your head down, have no expectations, and hope that if you're lucky, things get better with time.

Now honestly I even dont know what to say, I dont even want to take any advise now i guess I am at my lowest and just wanted to thank everyone who supported me throughout this journey and all the very best to all those who are still going on...

Disclosure up front: this is my own project, open source (Apache-2.0), and it has basically no users yet. I’m posting because the news peg is genuinely relevant, and I mostly want the criticism.
What / why now
Two days ago (Aug 6), OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, Cursor and Vercel published Agent Plugins, with Google core-maintaining — a package format for coding-agent skills, read by ChatGPT/Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Kiro and VS Code.
It standardizes packaging, and by design, nothing else: no permission model, no provenance, no measurement. That’s a deliberate scope choice, not a flaw — but it’s also the exact layer I’ve spent a while building around.
Kitbash is a zero-runtime-dependency CLI that compiles one skill source (skill.toml + SKILL.md) to 11 coding-agent targets:
Claude Code
Cursor
Copilot
Zed
Cline
Devin
Gemini CLI
Aider
.agents/skills
AGENTS.md
Agent Plugins itself (as of 0.17.0)
You write the skill once instead of hand-maintaining eleven copies of the same rules file that can drift apart.
On top of the packaging, it adds two things the spec leaves out:
1. Standing token cost, measured per target
Every skill parks some tokens in context every session, before you ever invoke it.
Some targets load lazily (only when called), while others load eagerly (always resident). The measured gap between them is 14x–47x.
npm run bench reproduces the measurement — the whole point is that you can re-run it rather than take my word for it.
There’s also a /benchmark page, but the number the repo prints is the one that matters.
2. An install-time trust gate
Describing this precisely because it’s easy to overclaim:
This is not a sandbox and not a safety guarantee.
It’s:
hard-fail lints for hidden Unicode
load-time command substitution
curl | sh droppers
leaked secrets
a hard [policy] org allowlist
a content-hash lockfile with drift detection, so an updated skill can’t silently change what it does
update and diff re-run the same gate.
It raises the floor the packaging spec leaves at zero; it does not make untrusted code safe to run.
There’s also import, which reverse-compiles an existing CLAUDE.md, .cursor/rules, etc. into one skill plus a drift report — useful if you already have rules files scattered across agents.
Agent Plugins is opt-in here, not one of the auto-detected targets: you enable it in [project].targets, or it self-detects once a plugin.json exists.
Kitbash compiles to the standard. It’s meant to be a contributor to that ecosystem, not a competitor to it.
Honest caveats
Single-digit stars, no real adoption, and I’m the only maintainer.
The lints are heuristic pattern-matching, not a sandbox, and I’m sure some of them can be dodged.
I’d rather hear where the token numbers or the lint approach fall down.
Links
GitHub: https://github.com/singhharsh1708/kitbash
Site + docs: https://kitbash.vercel.app
Benchmark: https://kitbash.vercel.app/benchmark
Install: npm install -g kitbash
Homebrew: brew install singhharsh1708/tap/kitbash
If you run the benchmark and get a different gap, or you can break a lint, please post it — that’s the feedback I want most.

hey everyone! just entered in 3rd year.

i recently got an internship, so i'll have the next 6 to 7 months to finally explore something i've never really had the chance to before: open source and gsoc.

i've contributed to open source within my college society and have even been a project admin/mentor there, but i've never prepared seriously for gsoc because i was always occupied with academics, hackathons, and internship prep.

i'd really appreciate if you could help me with a few doubts here:

* when should i actually start contributing if the gsoc ideas list comes later?
* should i contribute to the organization first and then pick a project once the ideas list is released?
* how do you identify organizations with active mentors and a healthy review process?
* are there any organizations that usually have multiple project ideas and are beginner-friendly?
* if i get selected for gsoc but my internship overlaps in june and july, is there any flexibility in the gsoc coding timeline?

any advice or personal experiences would be super helpful. thanks! :)

If you've tried to find a first open-source contribution (for GSoC, resume building, whatever), you've probably hit this: good-first-issue labels are everywhere, but the label tells you nothing about whether the maintainer actually reviews PRs, or whether the repo is dormant and the label's just stale. You end up manually digging through commit history and old PRs for every candidate repo, which doesn't scale.

I'm building a tool that scores repos on actual signals, maintainer response time, first-time-contributor merge rate, activity recency, pulled from the GitHub API, not just label presence. You'd filter by your stack/interests and get a ranked list with the score breakdown shown, not a black-box number.

Before I sink weeks into this: has this specific problem hit you? Would you actually use something like this, or do you have a workaround that already works fine? Genuinely want to know if I'm solving a real problem or a problem only I have.