Ask HN: Looking for a project to volunteer on? (February 2024)

55 points by theycallhermax 2 years ago | 55 comments

This thread is open to anyone seeking for volunteer projects and anyone who is seeking volunteers for their projects. SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: A good example would be to write the name of the project, and a short description. Also write down the project website and git forge URL, and write the programming languages it uses. Also, please don't forget to start your comment off with "SEEKING VOLUNTEERS" for people seeking projects to find your comment easier, and not get it mixed up with the "SEEKING PROJECTS" comments.

SEEKING PROJECTS: If comfortable doing so, write down your name, and programming languages that you know. Also don't forget to write down some of the projects that you have volunteered on, or some of the projects that you made, and what you are interested in working on. Optionally, you can write your email, if you want opportunities to be discussed privately. Also, please don't forget to start your comment off with "SEEKING PROJECTS" for people seeking volunteers to find your comment easier, and not get it mixed up with the "SEEKING VOLUNTEERS" comments.

nhatcher 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: IronCalc spreadsheet

IronCalc is a new open source spreadsheet engine written in Rust with bindings in Python and JavaScript. The engine can be compiled to wasm and runs in the browser.

Pitch:

https://www.ironcalc.com/

Playground:

https://playground.ironcalc.com/

Source Code:

https://github.com/ironcalc

IronCalc intends to be robust, light, fast, easy to use and Excel compatible.

Although IronCalc is already working there is still a long way to go. We want to build different skins like native apps, terminal applications. We need to incorporate all Excel functions. We want to add charts like maybe chartjs

The current skin is written in React/TypeScript.

If this peeks your interest send me an email hn@theuniverse.today

TharunPasam 2 years ago |

SEEKING PROJECTS

Hi there!

My name is Tharun Pasam, and I'm a fresher with a passion for machine learning. I have recently completed my studies and have been diving deep into the world of AI and ML. I have gained hands-on experience through projects that I've worked on and uploaded to my GitHub profile (github.com/TharunPasam).

In terms of programming languages, I am proficient in Python, which is widely used in the machine learning community. I have also dabbled in languages like Java and C++ during my academic journey.

Some of the projects I've volunteered on or created include:

Machine Learning Model Regularization. Image Processing with Autoencoders. Neural Network Implementation from Scratch in TensorFlow.

I'm eager to apply my skills and knowledge to real-world projects and continue learning and growing in the field of machine learning. If you have any opportunities available or if you'd like to discuss potential collaborations, please feel free to reach out to me at psm.thrn@gmail.com.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

giaour 2 years ago |

[meta comment]: Perhaps we should distinguish between "seeking contributors" and "seeking volunteers." I opened this thread hoping to see non-profits that need IT or software engineering support, but instead found a bunch of open-source projects looking for new contributors.

whatyesaid 2 years ago | |

There is already socialcoder for non profits, which also provides project management and liaison. This thread would not do better than that service for non-profits, simply because it's more organized.

giaour 2 years ago | | |

By the same logic, there is already Indeed, Monster, Dice, and LinkedIn, so the "Who is hiring?" thread would not do better than those services.

mdwalters 2 years ago | |

sorry for the confusion, i'll be sure to fix it for next month

jph 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: BoldContacts (simple pro bono accessibility software)

https://boldcontacts.org and joel@boldcontacts.org

Seeking volunteers to do usability piloting of the BoldContacts mobile app for iPhone & iPad. The software is for people affected by vision disabilities, cognitive disabilities, and motor disabilities. What's needed: download the app, try it with someone you love, and tell me what works well and what needs improvement. Thank you!

petrosilius 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: https://searchwing.org/ Search&Rescue Drones

https://gitlab.com/searchwing

SearchWing is a german based (berlin,augsburg) open source hard- and software project which designs, build and operate fixed wing drones for search&rescue operations on the open sea. We mainly operate in the mediterranean sea in cooperation with other NGOs, who actually operate rescue ships to search for people in distress and rescue them before they drown. Currently we are ~8 people, and we are working in our free time on this project.

As we are a full stack project we search for a lot of volunteers and we basically need help in every domain:

* software: python, nodejs, vuejs, c++, ROS, imageprocessing/deeplearning boatdetection, postgres, ...

* hardware: pcb design, thermalcameras, rgbcameras, wireless connectivity (wifi, ELRS), microcontrollers, raspberrypi

* airplane design / mechanical design: construct planes for long endurance

* project management: very open for people to steer, control and plan with us

* airplane building: we need also people helping us build all the planes

If your interested: contact@searchwing.org

TharunPasam 2 years ago | |

Hi, I am interested in this project.

We can further discuss at psm.thrn@gmail.com

xvello 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: https://letsblock.it - https://github.com/letsblockit/letsblockit/

A companion project for uBlockOrigin that curates a corpus of content blocking templates, and provides the server to create you personal list of content blocking rules. The official instance just hit 800 active lists and a lot of template suggestions have been filed recently.

The easiest way to contribute is to create new templates, fix or extend existing ones. You need to learn the uBlockOrigin syntax and how to properly target the right elements, happy to mentor! See recent PRs for examples and https://github.com/letsblockit/letsblockit/blob/main/data/fi... for documentation.

The server itself is built with Go and HTMX, it's pretty low-maintenance, but there's interesting improvements if you want to toy with it (need to open issues for these).

kscottz 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo Simulator

ROS is the open source software powering robots all over the globe. The project needs volunteers in every capacity, from core robotics software to visualization, data logging, and developer resources. Gazebo is our sibling library used to simulate robots prior to deploying code. Many of our repositories have "Good First Issue" tags for new contributors.

Source code and community resources for ROS, like Discord and Discourse, are all listed here:

https://github.com/ros2

Source code and resources for Gazebo are available here:

https://github.com/gazebosim

To get a sense of what people are doing with ROS check out the videos from our yearly developer conference ROSCon.

https://roscon.ros.org/2023/

If you are looking for some help getting started swing by our Discord server:

https://discord.com/servers/open-robotics-107782554369892765...

93po 2 years ago | |

This is perfect for me, thanks for posting it!

magic5227 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Musopen.org - Non-profit providing free, public domain music resources.

Looking for front and back end developers, as well as mobile developers to improve the stability, design and functionality of the Musopen.org website.

Musopen is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit charity, and all of the music and pdf files we host are free to the public without added copyrights/restrictions.

For more info, please see past press coverage of our work: https://musopen.org/press/

If interested, please tell us about yourself, your area of expertise, and if there is something in particular you'd like to help with: https://musopen.org/contact/ or aaron {at} musopen dot org

thierrydamiba 2 years ago |

SEEKING PROJECTS: Hello, my name is Thierry Damiba, and my language of choice is python.

In the past I have been a Data Scientist for DHS and SAIC. I’m a pretty junior engineer(4 years experience) interested in Semantic Search and Evaluation. Currently taking an LLM class with a professor at Stanford.

I’m also interested in classic ML and visualization. I can help throughout the pipeline from creating/scraping a dataset, to transforming the data, to creating a front end that is practical for users.

You can reach out to me here or at ptdamiba@gmail.com

Thanks!

20after4 2 years ago | |

You might like the Datasette project: https://datasette.io/

I don't think they are desperate for contributions but it's a welcoming environment and a fun project to hack on. You'll learn a lot just from reading the source and the incredibly informative PRs. The creator is a really talented developer with a great blog which shows up on the HN front page often.

simonw 2 years ago | | |

Thanks for suggesting us!

One of the nice things about Datasette is that it's based around plugins, which I think are a really great way to contribute to an open source project - you get to build out new functionality without even needing to wait on pull requests from the maintainer.

thierrydamiba 2 years ago | | |

Thanks for sharing, looks like a fun project.

mamcx 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: TablaM relational language (https://tablam.org)

TablaM is an in-progress programming language to provide a more ergonomic experience for building data-oriented applications.

This means that where most languages are focused on low-level details or engineering at large, TablaM is tailored with some small & big design decisions to make it enjoyable to write applications for e-commerce, finance, ERPs, and similar.

Cool things:

- TablaM marry the array + relational models. It means we should get very little need for manual loops and all the ops are vectorized.

- All the things are encoded as "tables", so you should be able to say the equivalent of `select * from file.open("a.txt") where line = "\n"`

- And then you could `join` `vecs & btrees & hashmap & files...`

- And then we have a standardized CRUD interface, so not `vec::push | btree::insert`

The code is in Rust. The major next stage is to add a parsing infra that allows to show nice errors like https://docs.rs/ariadne/latest/ariadne/index.html

Source Code:

https://github.com/Tablam/TablaM/

apineda 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: https://www.blacksheepwall.tv

It's a 2.5D Starcraft 1 viewer in TypeScript, Three.JS, GLSL and WASM.

https://github.com/alexpineda/titan-reactor

I will spend this weekend adding issues and cleaning up dev documentation. I still need help with water shader, plugin version and migration handling, and a few other topics.

reallymental 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: GoStreams (or Lightning)

It's an almost real-time data streaming service for the polygon.io data provider.

It's a project that I started a couple of years ago during the pandemic. I've developed several data-sinks for this service (KDB, QuestDB, Postgres), but it's become more of a Theseus' Ship, development is never ending!

The aim is to build a backtester that will attach to this data service.

https://github.com/tranquilo12/goStreams

The README is outdated, but the gist of the project is that it's trying to be a service that can download all the historical data (for the requested tickers), and will stream the live data to a data-sink, without any issues, and with a good terminal ui.

I'm also thinking of integrating the Charm's libraries with this too, love a good TUI. (https://charm.sh/)

Anyone up for this? You can find my email in my profile.

I'm interested in building this out as a project, it will not be made into a company etc. The repo will be public.

scosman 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Voicebox

Using LLM, Speach-to-Text and novel UIs to aid people with cerebral palsy, and allow them to communicate in real time.

https://github.com/scosman/voicebox

Explanation: https://scosman.net/blog/introducing_voicebox

yu3zhou4 2 years ago | |

Good luck with the project!

I’m working on something similar - ASR for dysarthric speech - and I’ll happily follow your project so maybe we can both benefit. Do you have some X/Mastodon account where you share the progress?

danobi 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: bpftrace

As non-profit as it get! Intersection of operating systems, compilers, and observability. C/C++/LLVM.

https://github.com/bpftrace/bpftrace

"good first issue" or "easy" tag in issues is a good place to start looking for something to do. Or DM me and we can find something interesting.

InfiniteBox 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Teaching to Learn (TTL)

A discord for people who'd like to learn (or improve their) skills by teaching them ^^ No experience needed, we'll teach you how to teach - and if you teach pretty well we'll even let you monetize.

Link to join: https://discord.gg/Ahgh7YneJ9

lasiotus 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Motūrus OS

Motūrus OS is a new operating system for VMs written in Rust. A lot of interesting things to do for someone interested in systems-level Rust projects, from a simple Elf loader to a crash-resistant filesystem.

Or just porting C stuff like vim.

https://github.com/moturus/motor-os

dubin 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEER/TAKEOVER: WaybackHN

A number of years ago I made https://waybackhn.com. It was a top HN post, and perhaps some of you remember it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9746188

As of recently I have not had the time/energy to maintain it, or to make improvements here and there (not that much needs to change for it to satisfy it's purpose). As you can see it's not currently working (although it was up to a couple weeks ago!).

It's a Python/Flask app. Hosting costs are $5/mo via PythonAnywhere.

Feel free to email me at waybackhn@gmail.com if you are interested.

abrichr 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: OpenAdapt.AI: AI-First Process Automation

OpenAdapt is the world's first open source AI-first process automation framework. If you're interested in the promise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) / Visual Language Models (VLMs), but want to take them beyond question answering chatbots, here's your chance! We're using them to automate repetitive tasks in GUI workflows. See https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt for more. Python / TypeScript (but open to other languages).

jph 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Assertables (Rust crate)

https://github.com/sixarm/assertables-rust-crate

Assertables is a Rust crate that provides assert macros for strings, sets, streams, and more. This helps Rust coders write better clearer tests, and get better clearer error messages.

The aim is to encourage more developers to try Assertables. If you're a coder, want to write more macros? If you're a writer, want to improve the docs? If you're a testing advocate, want to reach out to developers to ask them to try Assertables?

The project is 100% free open source pro bono.

rgbrgb 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: https://github.com/psugihara/FreeChat

FreeChat is a simple LLM chat app built with SwiftUI and llama.cpp server. The main goal of FreeChat is to make open, local, private models accessible to more people.

In particular, would love help with adding a search bar, model browser, or making a satellite WebRTC-based iOS app (check the issues). Unicorn contributors who are comfortable with design and dev very welcome. Designers / design focused hackers, this is an open source consumer apps that prioritizes UX!

elric 2 years ago |

SEEKING PROJECTS: Java developer and general geek, comfortable with a wide variety of languages & technologies (Java, PHP, shell, K8S, Cloud shit, PostgreSQL, Solr, etc). My current freelance gig isn't very challenging, so I have some time and energy to put towards something interesting.

Interests are pretty wide ranging, from FOSS to electronic music to societal problems. Feel free to hit me up if you think you'd benefit from my assistance. Am in GMT+1.

petrosilius 2 years ago | |

hey we are looking for people with postgresql experience and we are also GMT+1, does this sound interesting to you? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39218635

sebastianconcpt 2 years ago |

SEEKING PROJECTS: 20+ years software engineer, lots of experience in Smalltalk and JavaScript. Looking for Ruby on Rails in general or Rust projects on Web3 to volunteer on. Not a beginner in either of those. Find my email in https://github.com/sebastianconcept Put "Volunteer Opportunity" in the subject, just so I don't confuse you with a recruiter.

aliljet 2 years ago |

SEEKING PROJECTS: I'm a pretty senior engineer at a series-a funded startup (BeeKeeperAI, we're enabling untrusted parties to work together with fancy confidential computing) having fun with golang, python, and rust. I emerged from UCSF having built and published in machine learning space. Broadly, I'm a guy who likes to build things and I'd love to help you! pav.gup at gmail dot com.

madduci 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS OpenE57

https://github.com/openE57/openE57

madduci 2 years ago | |

openE57 is a modern C++ implementation of the libE57 for reading/writing 3D Models in the E57 format

maerF0x0 2 years ago |

SEEKING PROJECTS: 14+ years software engineer, lots of experience in Go. Looking for Rust projects to volunteer on. I'm a beginner looking to get hands on experience with Rust.

mailto:0-ribbons-hardtop@icloud.com

Put "Volunteer Opportunity" in the subject, just so I don't confuse you with a recruiter.

euclidian 2 years ago |

SEEKING PROJECTS: My name is Robert Goss, C++ engineer ~ 10 years experience with a pure maths PhD background. Some Rust, Python, Go experience. Spent my employed life at Autodesk.

Interested in any maths/geometry projects going around.

Currently doing a few bits with the gcc-rust project.

sumo43 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: open source self-play training for language models

we are a small team associated with EleutherAI. looking to push the frontier of open source language models through self-play. so far we have implemented SPIN. compute included.

email tyoma9k@gmail.com

edit: formatting

iancrasta 2 years ago |

SEEKING PROJECTS: 9 years of experience UX/Product Design mainly in B2B SaaS. Interested in contributing towards Climate Tech, Dev Experience tools or No/Low code tools. Email in my profile.

petrosilius 2 years ago | |

not directly climate tech, but still we try to help people who are partly fleeing countrys who are massivly affected by climate change, does this interest you? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39218635

Daishiman 2 years ago |

SEEKING PROJECTS - 20 years of coding, tons of Python and Linux, a bit of web frontend, data pipelines, and many years of core AWS products, ideally looking for projects with social impact.

petrosilius 2 years ago | |

we try to help people from drowning who often need to flee their countries due to war or climate problems, does this sound interesting to you? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39218635

soobinrho 2 years ago | |

Hello Daishiman, a non-profit called H4H (Hearts for the Homeless) is looking for help with finishing their app. [1] They work in disaster relief, mental health screenings, and vaccinations for the unhoused populations both in America and abroad. They actually already have some code written on GitHub. (To see, please contact kyle [at] h4hinternational [dot] org)

Disclaimer: I am Soobin, a co-founder of Nsustain, which stands for e[N]vironment and [sustain]ability. We connect people who work in high impact areas but need help with technology with people who have the tech knowledge and want to help.

[1]https://nsustain.com/d/46-app-to-help-the-homeless

bumby 2 years ago | | |

Would you be aware of any energy conservation projects, like municipalities in underserved areas that don't have the money to optimize building automation systems and such?

LorenDB 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Nheko

Nheko is a C++/Qt/QML Matrix client. https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko

tyteen4a03 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Software Engineer (Game / Web) / SRE / DevOps / Technical Artist (other roles also available) at Toontown: Corporate Clash

Toontown: Corporate Clash is a non-profit, fan-made revival of the defunct Disney MMORPG, Toontown Online, with a brand new storyline, new mechanics and new characters. We're committed to pushing the genre of Toontown Online forward - [check out the trailer for our latest update](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImehBT4ChVI) on what we've done for the game. We've also used our home-grown IP to raise funds for charity; last year [we raised $22k for Childre's Miracle Network Hospitals](https://corporateclash.net/news/article/134) by licensing our IP to be made into plushies.

We get anywhere between 400 and 600 concurrent players on a typical day, and up to 2000 players when a major update launches. Our team consists of 100+ passionate volunteers in all stages of their careers, with many having used the experience gained at our project to help them secure jobs and further opportunities in the industry.

We use a wide variety of languages and frameworks:

* Game - Panda3D (Python code, C++ engine), MongoDB / Postgres

* Networking - HAProxy and Astron (C++, but we're also looking at adopting Rust)

* Web - Our legacy stack is PHP + Laravel + Vue, with the new stack being based on TypeScript (Next.js, Hono/Elysia, Cloudflare Workers)

* Launcher - PyQt at the moment, but we're looking to adopt Tauri (TypeScript + Rust)

* Hosting - Cloudflare Workers / Pages, AWS, Azure, GCP (wherever free credits we can get)

* Infra - Docker

If you are an aspiring tech person who wants real-life experience in a large-scale project, we would love to hear from you!

(NOTE: We typically ask for all applicants to have at least 3 months of in-game gameplay.)

https://corporateclash.net/help/apply

bradly 2 years ago |

SEEKING PROJECTS: Ruby on Rails eng with 16 year experience looking for something of value to contribute to. Email in profile.

PianoGym 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: https://PianoGym.com

Here's a quick video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faxNDhOjlh4

Piano Gym is a learning and practice ecosystem focused on prioritizing music theory and performance skills acquisition through the use of flash cards and sheet music. We use flash cards in order to pair them with modern learning techniques like spaced repetition, graded feedback, and progress tracking so that you can practice material and work through content that is managed by Piano Gym, and all you have to do is enroll in a school/course/lesson and do your reps! Just show up every day and do 15 minutes of reviews. You're going to make progress.

Our website uses the Piano to navigate exercises as well as regular keyboard/mouse input. We work on browser technology and are looking to eventually make it mobile devices.

We provide content creation for everyone so that anyone can make their own schools/courses/lessons and the best part is each school gets its own landing page.

For example we're using the methods book from https://freepianomethod.com which is provided by Mayron Cole, and if you wanted to practice it without signing up or enrolling you could easily visit this link: https://pianogym.com/schools/Mayron%20Cole%20Method

Even better when you find the piece you want to practice you can share it directly like so: https://pianogym.com/schools/Mayron%20Cole%20Method?sheet_mu...

Our goal is to do this for free. We believe that no one should be blocked from learning. And one of the issues with this at the moment is that our team is very small and has been currently working nights and weekends to make this happen. We would love the chance to add a technical member to our team in order to build this product out to its full vision.

Areas of work we need help with

- UI/UX

- Refining the piano playing game feel

- Adding support for external piano pitch detection

- Creating a community

If you're interested please feel free to direct message me or my email DoYourReps@gmail.com

Fervicus 2 years ago | |

You forgot the .com in your url.

PianoGym 2 years ago | | |

Thank you. This has been fixed :)

chubot 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS - https://www.oilshell.org/ - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/

I'm looking for people to help fill out the "standard library" for Oils/YSH. We're implementing a shell for Python and JavaScript programmers who avoid shell!

On the surface, this is writing some very simple functions in typed Python. But I've realized that the hardest parts are specifying, TESTING, and documenting what the functions do.

Fun part: you just write in typed Python and our tools automatically translate it to fast C++.

---

The most recent release announcement also asks for help - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/01/release-0.19.0.html (long)

If you find all those details interesting (if maybe overwhelming), you might have a mind for language design, and could be a good person to help.

Surveying what Python and JavaScript do is very helpful, e.g. for the recent Str.replace() function, which is nontrivial (takes a regex or string, and replacement template or string)

But there are also very simple methods to get started, like Dict.values() and List.indexOf(), which can be less than 20 lines of code. Other people have already contributed code. Examples:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/commit/58d847008427dba2e60fe...

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/commit/8f38ee36d01162593e935...

Again the specifying and testing is the real work.

This page can also be useful to tell if you'll have fun working on the project - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-Contributors-Have...

More on #help-wanted on Zulip (requires login) - https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/417617-help-wa...

Please send a message on Github or Zulip! Or e-mail me andy at oilshell dot org.

Snowfield9571 2 years ago | |

You know at first glance I thought the Shell Oil Company was asking for volunteers.

sindoc 2 years ago |

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Lutino.io > Edit/revamp/extend good quality code in Java plus some marketing tricks.

UncleEntity 2 years ago | |

Was kind of curious so went to Lutino.io (because there's no link to the project) and it appears to be a proprietary subscription tracking service with no obvious way to "volunteer".