Backend Engineer Looking to Start Open Source Contributions in Java AI Ecosystem — Need Guidance
Hi everyone,
I’m a backend engineer with around 6 years of experience working primarily in Java and Spring Boot microservices on AWS.
My current skill set includes:
Java
Spring Boot
Microservices
REST APIs
Kafka
Distributed Systems
Docker
AWS
System Design
Spring Security
JPA/Hibernate
Recently, I’ve started exploring:
Spring AI
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
LangChain4j
Agentic AI systems
AI orchestration workflows
Vector databases
I’m very new to open source contribution culture and honestly a bit confused about:
where to start
how people pick issues
how to approach maintainers
what kind of contributions beginners should make first
I would really appreciate guidance from experienced contributors.
Some questions:
Which Java AI/open-source projects would be best for someone with my background?
Should I start with documentation/examples before code contributions?
How do you properly understand a large codebase before contributing?
Any beginner-friendly repositories in the Java AI ecosystem?
I’m genuinely interested in learning and contributing long term, not just making random PRs.
Would appreciate any advice/resources/community suggestions.
Thanks!