Exorcise Your Newbie Demons by Contributing to Exercism

If you want to contribute code to open source, the level of skill you need is good enough.

Not "brilliant". Not "fluent" or "proficient". Oh, certainly, sometimes you'll need those. Some projects, though, could use your help even if your skill level falls closer to "barely coherent" than "competent".

One such project is Exercism whose purpose is to help people improve their programming skills in many different languages.

The most obvious way that it does this is by giving people practice problems.

A slightly less obvious way is by encouraging peer code review. People not only get to struggle with a problem on their own, they also have conversations. They give and receive feedback. They opine. They discover code smells and point out stylistic issues. You can learn a lot from getting feedback, and even more from giving it.

Over 15,000 people have used Exercism like this.

There is another, less obvious, way that Exercism helps people improve their programming skills. It's a sort of meta-game. Instead of writing code and submitting it to Exercism for feedback, you can write code and submit it to GitHub for feedback. It's the same sort of process—discuss, opine, learn. In one case you're solving practice problems. In the other, you're adding practice problems, or improving them, or helping build the site itself.

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by Katrina Owen via SitePoint