My background: I’ve worked around tech recruiting for the last three years.
You should probably try to work on whatever open source project is most exciting to you, rather than one that you think will have a positive impact on the world. In my experience, you learn a lot from trying to code things that interest you, especially if you get excited about the project and think about it a lot. I think that the career capital from such projects is quite large, and so the altruistic impact is relatively unimportant.
The exception here is if you’re really excited about projects *because* they’re altruistic—in that case you should go ahead with them, especially if they’re a project you’ll still learn from.
FWIW I think that working on the LessWrong/EA forum software is a pretty good choice if you want to learn frontend web development—it uses some cool modern technologies.
My background: I’ve worked around tech recruiting for the last three years.
You should probably try to work on whatever open source project is most exciting to you, rather than one that you think will have a positive impact on the world. In my experience, you learn a lot from trying to code things that interest you, especially if you get excited about the project and think about it a lot. I think that the career capital from such projects is quite large, and so the altruistic impact is relatively unimportant.
The exception here is if you’re really excited about projects *because* they’re altruistic—in that case you should go ahead with them, especially if they’re a project you’ll still learn from.
FWIW I think that working on the LessWrong/EA forum software is a pretty good choice if you want to learn frontend web development—it uses some cool modern technologies.