Ask HN: How can I contribute?

The classic answer is: "please write all this boring documentation stuff for $your_favourite_project", or pick a boring bug report in some project, triage ot and fix it. It's all very valuable stuff, but it's fracking boring.

The real answer is: find a project you like, even a small one, and patch it to do something you find even more useful. If you think you can't do it, maybe it's a good chance to use it as a skill-up project. Or, rewrite an interesting lib or useful tool from $language_you_dont_like to $language_you_love. Or just put on GitHub some private tool you wrote that someone else might find useful.

You know, people (myself included) write on HN not because they want to "contribute" or being "useful to the community." But because it is an interesting past time. Is being useful to other hackers really your goal?

You could write the process and steps that got you to where you are now, for others who also want to become employable.

Focus on replying to the questions in the 'ask' thread. This is the community directly asking for feedback/input.

Your best projects will come from working on things you're passionate about.

work on an existing open source project that does something you need/want.

Make a decent pivot table for BootStrap + KnockOut.js :).