explaingit

mungell/awesome-for-beginners

★ 85,300Audience · vibe coderComplexity · 1/5MaintainedSetup · easy

TLDR

A curated list of beginner-friendly open-source projects organized by programming language, with links to issues marked as suitable for first-time contributors.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Curated project list
      Beginner-friendly issues
      First-time contributor guide
    How to use it
      Pick your language
      Find a project
      Start contributing
    Organization
      30+ languages
      Issue labels
      One-line descriptions
    For maintainers
      Add your project
      Label beginner issues
      Submit pull request

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Find your first open-source project to contribute to by browsing projects in a language you know or want to learn.

USE CASE 2

Discover small, well-scoped tasks labeled as beginner-friendly to build confidence before tackling larger issues.

USE CASE 3

Get your project listed as beginner-friendly by adding the right issue labels and submitting a pull request.

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
License could not be detected automatically. Check the repository's LICENSE file before use.

In plain English

This is a curated list of open-source projects that are friendly to first-time contributors. The problem it solves is a common one for new programmers: you want to start contributing to real software on GitHub but have no idea which projects will welcome a beginner or which tasks are small enough to actually finish. The list collects projects that have explicitly tagged some of their issues with labels like first-timers-only, good first issue, beginner, or help-wanted, signalling that maintainers have set those tasks aside as suitable starting points. The list itself is just a long, organized README. Projects are grouped by the programming language they are written in, including .NET, Angular, C, C++, C#, Clojure, CSS, Dart, Elixir, Elm, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Julia, Kotlin, Markdown, MLOps, Perl, PHP, Pug, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Smalltalk, Swift, and TypeScript, so a learner can pick a language they already know or want to learn and find suitable projects in it. Each entry links to the project's repository, names the specific issue label being used, and gives a one-line description of what the project does. Maintainers who want their projects added are invited to add the right label and submit a pull request. The list is inspired by the First Timers Only blog post and points readers to a separate guide for non-programmer contributors. Use it when you have a basic grasp of a language and want to make your first real contribution to an open-source codebase but do not know where to start. The full README is longer than what was provided.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I want to make my first contribution to an open-source project. I know Python. What beginner-friendly projects should I look at?
Prompt 2
Show me how to find and claim a 'good first issue' from the awesome-for-beginners list in my favorite language.
Prompt 3
I maintain an open-source project. How do I get it added to the awesome-for-beginners list so beginners can find us?
Open on GitHub → Explain another repo

Generated 2026-05-21 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.