A list of awesome Swift projects to contribute to on Hacktoberfest 2019
It’s October 1st, and it means that the biggest event of the open source community called Hacktoberfest starts today 🎃🌍🖥
For those of you who haven’t heard about Hacktoberfest challenge, here is a short description from the official website:
Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean and DEV. Hacktoberfest is open to everyone in our global community. To participate, four pull requests must be submitted to public GitHub repositories. You can sign up anytime between October 1 and October 31.
The first 50,000 developers, who complete the challenge, will receive an awesome Hacktoberfest t-shirt 🔥
Last year, I had completed this challenge as part of my open source course at Seneca College, and it was so much fun that I decided to take part in this challenge again this year. In this post, I would like to compile a list of open source iOS/macOS projects you can contribute to. There are not as many Swift open source projects as JavaScript OS projects, for example, so I hope this article will help you to find one.
I would like to start with the ones that I worked on previously and had a positive experience.
iOS
Browsers
Brave 🦁
The very first browser I contributed to was Brave for iOS. It’s a privacy focused browser available on all major platforms including iOS and macOS. I made a small contribution last year, and the maintainers were very kind and supportive. Also I had classmates who fixed some bugs in this app, and they said good things about this project too. I definitely recommend to check out this project:
Firefox 🔥🦊
Last year, I had an opportunity to fix some bugs and implement some features in Firefox Focus for iOS, which is another privacy browser but from Mozilla. It was another fun project to work on for me, and similar to Brave, the maintainers were willing to help me if I had any questions or struggles. Unfortunately, Mozilla paused the development of this project, but they still have their main iOS browser — Firefox. I haven’t had any experience working with this particular project yet, but I plan on doing it this month (I’ve already made a small patch and opened a pull request there). However, I worked on bunch of other Mozilla’s projects (Firefox, Firefox add-ons, Focus), and I find their community very welcoming to their contributors, which is essential in open source projects.
If you’re interested in contributing to Firefox for iOS, visit:
Messengers
Signal
A private, open source messenger. Its codebase consists of both Objective-C and Swift. There are 361 issues opened, check it out and try to find one for yourself:
Telegram
Telegram is a popular cloud-based messaging service, and it’s also open source. The project includes not only Swift, but also Objective-C, Objective-C++, C, C++, and it has 360 contributors. If you’re new to open source development, I wouldn’t recommend this project as a start point.
macOS
IINA 🎬
It’s an open-source media player for macOS written in Swift. It seems like this project is being developed actively (688 issues and 23 PRs are opened at the moment).
Lona 💻
It’s a tool for defining design systems and using them to generate cross-platform UI code, Sketch files, and other artifacts. I had made about 5 contributions to this project earlier this year, and I found it quite interesting. Also, if you don’t have much background in macOS dev, you can find some really good first issues since the maintainers do a great job in writing issue descriptions and help their contributors. It doesn’t seem that they’ve been developing this project actively in these latter days, so I suggest you to reach out to Devin, who is maintaining this project, on Twitter (@dvnabbott) and tell him that you want to work on this project (that’s how I got involved in this project 😀).
Swift libraries and frameworks
Alamofire
An HTTP networking library written in Swift.
Eureka
An elegant iOS form builder in Swift.
Kitura
A server-side Swift framework developed and maintained by IBM.
Lottie
A library for rendering vector based animations developed and maintained by Airbnb.
SwifterSwift
This project contains a large collection of all kinds of Swift extensions. It doesn’t have many issues opened, but you’re free to create your own extension that you think can be helpful for other Swift developers, and submit a Pull Request!
Vapor
A server-side Swift framework.
Bonus
Swift
I wrote about all types of different projects above, but if you feel really confident, you should go and checkout a bug tracker of the Swift programming language!
Happy Hacktoberfest 🎉
If you have any projects to suggest, feel free to drop a comment 👇
You can also reach out to me on Twitter: @klymenko_v 🙌
