I’m Girish Kumar Yadav, a Computer Science student eager to contribute to OSGeo as a complete beginner in open-source development. I’m reaching out to seek guidance on how to get started.
My tech stack includes Java, C, Python, HTML, CSS, and SQL, along with beginner-level skills in UI/UX design and web development. I’d love to contribute to projects where my skills might be useful, and any recommendations for beginner-friendly repositories or tasks would be incredibly helpful.
Additionally, if there are any specific resources or best practices for new contributors within OSGeo, I’d be grateful for the insight. Thank you in advance for your guidance – I’m excited about the opportunity to contribute and grow with OSGeo.
We often advise folks to look at the OSGeo Live project which offers a tour of free and open source software for geospatial (foss4g) technologies to new people. The result is a USB or bootable VM or something which can be used to try out stuff.
It is a nice way to get started as you can get some experience with different projects and see what you find interesting.
It also provides an example of how to work with others, communicate in public, make pull-requests, sign up to am email list (or discussion forum) and have some fun while doing it.
Thank you for the warm welcome and for pointing me to the OSGeo Live project. It’s a fantastic resource, and I appreciate the thought that’s gone into making it accessible for beginners.
I’ve successfully installed OSGeo software using VirtualBox, and I’m eager to dive deeper into exploring its capabilities. Could you guide me to resources or documentation that explain how to use the software, especially for someone new to geospatial technologies? Specifically, I’d love to know:
What are some practical projects or use cases I can try out with OSGeo Live?
Are there any beginner-friendly guides for using the included tools effectively?
How can I start contributing to OSGeo projects, particularly on GitHub? For example, I’m looking for steps on identifying and resolving “good first issues” or making meaningful contributions.
Thank you for your time and for creating such an inclusive and engaging community. I’m looking forward to learning and contributing!
It briefly covers all the software installed in Live. I think there is a newer version of it probably short-cut on the desktop.
Other suggestions for getting started
If you haven’t already, you should try going thru the wizard on the osgeo page
which will guide you thru projects that might be of interest.
Watch some videos from conferences over the years broken out by project topic here
I’m on the PostGIS and pgRouting dev teams. If you are interested in SQL, those might be ones to explore. Both pgRouting and PostGIS have extensive workshop documents, that we would love a beginner to try to follow and provide feedback of what is confusing or what could be made clearer.
If you speak other languages besides English, you may be interested in helping translation of documentation. I think that is a good way to learn the benefits of each project. Several of our projects are being translated here