Open Source Contributing: Real-World Software Development in the Wild

Description

Most coding projects in school are built from scratch & disappear after the semester ends, but professional developers spend their careers working on large, evolving codebases maintained by distributed teams. In this project, you'll dive into the real open-source ecosystem by contributing to an active community project like Open WebUI, tackling actual issues from their GitHub tracker alongside developers around the world. You'll learn to navigate unfamiliar codebases, collaborate with project maintainers through code reviews, follow contribution guidelines, and see your work merged into software that thousands of people actually use. Whether you're fixing bugs, improving accessibility, enhancing documentation, or building small features, you'll gain invaluable experience with the workflows, tools, and communication practices that define modern software development. 

This is your chance to build a public portfolio of contributions, earn recognition in the open-source community, and develop the practical skills:  reading others' code, writing for maintainability, responding to feedback—that separate academic programming from professional software engineering.