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Searching good first issue returns thousands of results. Most are stale, already taken, or far harder than the label admits. Tracer reads the project, the issue and your skills, then tells you which ones are worth your Saturday and why.

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One issue, as Tracer hands it to you

79%

Make the right sidebar resizable, like the left one

openstreetmap/iD3.9K starsopened 3 years agoactive today

JavaScriptCSSMedium3-10 hours
  • Written in JavaScript, which you know
  • Nobody is assigned and no pull request touches it
  • Maintainers reply to pull requests in about 14 hours
  • Nobody has said what finished looks like

Three years old and still worth taking, because the project is alive and nobody has claimed it. That is the judgement a label cannot make for you.

Eight questions, asked of every issue

Each one is scored, weighted and published. You can read the exact model, disagree with it, and open a pull request against it.

Your stack25%
Is it written in things you already know?
Actually free20%
Is it genuinely free, or has someone quietly taken it?
Project health15%
Is the project alive, and do outside contributions actually merge?
Issue clarity15%
Does it say enough to start, and to know when you are done?
Your time10%
Does the size of it fit the time you said you have?
Learning5%
Would it teach you something you said you wanted to learn?
Maintainers5%
If you open a pull request, will anyone look at it?
Competition5%
Are three other people already circling it?

A label is not a promise

Most of the wasted evenings in open source come from trusting one. Tracer reads what actually happened on the issue instead.

Somebody already called it

Nobody was assigned, but three comments down someone said they were on it. Tracer reads the thread and tells you before you start.

It has been dead for a year

Still open, still labelled, last touched eleven months ago. Age and activity sit on the row, not one click away.

A pull request already exists

Someone linked a PR that never got reviewed. The issue looks open and is not, and no label anywhere says so.

Open source, and inspectable

A recommender nobody can take apart is not one worth trusting. The weights, the rules and the code are all public under an MIT licence. Tracer should eventually be able to recommend its own issues.

Find something worth doing this weekend.