How to start contributing

[Austin Shafer]

Someone in another thread was just asking if there are plans to add
libxo support to ifconfig, to make ifconfig pretty-print in json. You
could be that plan?

There are a number of people in the freebsd discord, many of which work
on porting projects. I'm sure they would appreciate help and/or
testers. There's also the google summer of code ideas.

> I’m final year cse undergrad, looking to work in core OS technologies. Can somebody please give me a quick start about ongoing freebsd projects. 
You should pick an area/subject you use daily, and try to make it work
on freebsd. When I was in a similar situation I had some fun with
helping with the intel/amd graphics drivers. It mostly involved
importing code from linux, making some trivial changes to the linuxkpi,
and testing it.

> And I have shortage of space and computation power, is there any alternative to generate the build without me purchasing new machine. 

Honestly you may have to rent the cheapest freebsd instance you can on
aws/digitalocean/ramnode/whatever and build there. The meta-mode route
also works but I'm guessing low-end hardware is going to run into
trouble building llvm if you don't have much RAM. I say give it a go on
your machine and see what happens.

If you're only working on kernel stuff, you could just build the kernel
(which literally any machine is capable of) and install it without
building world. YMMV

Just keep in mind people like that you want to contribute, but
absolutely nobody is going to hold your hand and tell you how to do
stuff. You just gotta dive in headfirst and you'll get your legs under
you soon :) Again, the discord is active and people are very helpful there.

Good luck!
        Austin