This week, we evaluated several open-source projects to decide if they are suitable for college students to contribute. Our group examined PyTorch. Click to see more details! ↓

Evaluation of PyTorch

PyTorch is one of the open-source projects I use the most frequently. It provides a universal and simple framework with numpy-ish syntax for developers to program for tensor calculation and neural networks. This is remarkable because prior to the birth of PyTorch people often had to build the wheels time after time. Moreover, the implementation of PyTorch is done by C++, and it provides a interface for people to build their modules in Python first and then compile it to C++ code, which is much more efficient than programming everything in Python.
However, PyTorch is not an open-source project suitable for beginners. Admittedly, it is an active and large-scale community, but very few issues are beginner friendly. I will say one may start with PyTorch if he/she has good knowledge in Python, C++, and Neural Networks at the same time, otherwise it is not recommended.
More details can be found in our PyTorch Evaluation

Some Other Projects

I looked the VSCode Evaluation because VSCode is my favorite IDE, with elegant GUI and various features (but VSCode can be redundant if all you want is a few features). After reading the evaluation, it turns out that, similar to PyTorch, VSCode is an active and large open-source project that is not beginner-friendly (few issues tagged beginner/starter friendly; issues opened and closed very quickly).
Some of the evaluations are not completed so I can’t really get an idea if the project is beginner friendly or not.

Takeaway

I have the feeling that most of the established open-source projects are not for beginners to contribute to. You may try to contribute to the docs, but making meaningful code contributions is a whole different story. The best candidates for contribution may be those of moderate size and still under development. I believe Huggingface is such a community because the AI community is marching rapidly and huggingface is always chasing the advancement of the AI community.