Looking for open source projects to contribute as a beginner

Have a look at this thread - it contains a list of OS projects which could do with help

Just a suggestion like that… Why not a library to simplify Form inputs helpers that will support view styles like bootstrap, materialize_css…
There is this project but it is not really oriented to a particular view style: GitHub - beam-community/formulator: A form library for Phoenix · GitHub.

This tutorial is a good starting point: Dynamic forms with Phoenix « Plataformatec Blog

In the end we could write something like:

input :email, "your email", class: "input-class", wrapper: [class: "col-6-sm"], label: [tag: :span]

Since you have background in front-end development there are at least two projects that can always use that set of skills:

• GitHub - elixir-lang/ex_doc: ExDoc produces HTML and EPUB documentation for Elixir projects · GitHub
• GitHub - hexpm/hexpm: API server and website for Hex · GitHub

Especially with hex.pm, since you know front-end you should be at home with that aspect of the project and that could be a good transition to the back-end parts. In either case, even tiny quality of life improvements to either project have big positive impact as these tools are used by pretty much everyone in the community There are setup instructions in respective READMEs but if run into any problems open up an issue (and/or just let me know privately) - we definitely want to make it as easy as possible for new contributors.

Thank you, this was exactly what I was looking for. I will download the repo and try it out.

I am trying to jump into a more challenging position and fear that what employers are looking for are original open source projects.

Is there any projects that come to mind that you would recommend? I can’t think of anything rigorous besides 1) Elixir implementation of Bitcoin, which is really out of my league.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

This will probably sound quite boring but something I believe could have a great impact would be to improve the documentation of popular libraries: visit hex.pm, choose some package that looks interesting to you and just try to follow the instructions in the readme. In my experience most of them are outdated, incomplete, or simply wrong. You will learn a lot and will help the community immensely.

Solid documentation is essential for any meaningful piece of software, unfortunately even when Elixir provides nice tools for this purpose many maintainers underestimate or forget the importance of this.

Unfortunately, my goal is to jump into a more rigorous job and need to prove I can handle the load. I enjoy documentation and will write it anyway, but the focus is on the rigor of the project. Any ideas on what to create a project on would be immensely appreciated!

I just had a (selfish!) project idea.

An absinthe middleware that will collect statistics on what mutations and fields are being used by which clients. Would be great if it had some graphs as well. I think this idea has a nice mixture of frontend and backend elements.

Never used absinthe before. Why would one want this? middleware that will collect statistics on what mutations and fields are being used by which clients.