đź”” Prelude: I have a bad feeling about this: once again, I find myself stuck trying to choose the right project.

Main Content

Still WIP

At the end of this week, I haven’t submitted my first PR yet. Most of my time went into searching for a suitable open‑source project, and my plan is to update this post again after I finally publish my first PR.

Since I previously mentioned that I want to contribute to a repo related to $finance$🤑, I spent a good amount of time exploring that topic. Here are some projects currently on my list:

AI-powered investment platform

Microsoft Qlib (https://github.com/microsoft/qlib)

Qlib describes itself as “an AI‑oriented quantitative investment platform,” but in simpler words, it’s a framework that provides data tools, modeling support, and workflow automation to help build AI‑driven quantitative trading strategies.

  • I’m personally very interested in this project and have already started exploring it. The development activity is not bad — issues and PRs are still being handled as recently as this week.
  • It uses Python, has plenty of issues to choose from, focuses on a hot topic (AI), and the documentation is fairly complete.
  • But…I spent an entire afternoon debugging my Python environment. Absolutely terrifying.

Open‑source banking system

Apache Fineract (https://github.com/apache/fineract)

  • This is an open‑source banking system written in Java. I feel that its tech stack aligns well with what employers in the industry expect. If I can learn its design principles and make meaningful contributions, it could be very helpful for my future job search.
  • However, the repo doesn’t have a typical Issues section, and its contribution rules seem quite different. I might need extra time to figure out how to get started.
  • Still, this is the project I’m currently most interested in.

Personal-finance app

Actual Budget (https://github.com/actualbudget/actual)

  • This personal finance platform is super active: around 30 PRs were handled within just a week, and it has around 23k stars. Clearly a very popular project.
  • It mainly uses TypeScript and focuses on “practical frontend” features. The demo isn’t such fancy, but the features look solid and well‑built.
  • It doesn’t feel “technically fancy” or groundbreaking, but it solves real problems — exactly the type of project I care about and would like to contribute to.

🧳 Summary

Overall, I’m still in the process of selecting the right project and diving into the code, but I’m getting closer. Hopefully I can finally report back with my first PR on weekend.

Updates

Over the past several days, a few things happened that changed the direction of my work.

  1. At first, I planned to continue exploring Qlib. However, when I tried to set up the environment, uv and pyenv ended up conflicting with each other again.
  2. I spent additional time rebuilding a clean environment, but unexpectedly, Python packages started throwing compilation errors—some of them simply refused to build.
  3. At that point, I felt I had already invested too much time just dealing with environment issues. So I decided to switch back to a project I’m more familiar with: OpsiMate (https://github.com/OpsiMate/OpsiMate ), which I worked on during release 0.2.
  4. While reviewing feature requests, I found an issue that has not been implemented yet: https://github.com/OpsiMate/OpsiMate/issues/94 . It’s new, has reference implementations, and involves a reasonable amount of work. It felt like the right fit, so I decided to focus my efforts on contributing to OpsiMate.