Open Source Monthly: Two Projects Worth Your Attention
Finding the right open source project to contribute to can be as challenging as the contribution itself. This month, we highlight two projects that serve different purposes—one tackles food insecurity through technology, the other celebrates women in tech—but both offer meaningful ways to get involved, whether you write code or not.
Project of the Month: Sharing Excess
Sharing Excess, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, partners with grocery stores, restaurants, wholesalers, and farmers to redistribute more than 10,000 pounds of food daily that would otherwise go to waste. The organization began when founder Evan Ehlers, then a Drexel University student, used his remaining meal swipes at the end of the semester to buy campus food and deliver it to people in need. The idea spread, and students at his alma mater followed suit by donating swipes and volunteering as drivers.
To manage those deliveries, Drexel students built the Food Rescue App, which volunteer drivers use to bring food to over 180 nonprofits and food banks. Since December 2020, Ryan McHenry has maintained the project, rebuilding it as a Progressive Web App (PWA) with a client-side stack of React, Redux, and Sass, plus Firebase for authentication, storage, and API services. The project is still evolving: McHenry wants to combine Sharing Excess’ efforts with those of food banks, think tanks, and similar organizations to strengthen their collective impact. A partnership with Free Store 15104 is already underway.
The team keeps a public website and a design system alongside the Food Rescue PWA. If you want to contribute, you could update Wiki documentation, style new design system components, improve the CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions, or add data and route visualizations for drivers.
What makes Sharing Excess stand out is its community: most contributors are Drexel students, and the project has grown to 12 campus chapters across the U.S. That approach—introducing open source at the collegiate level—expands access for early-career developers and strengthens the ecosystem as a whole.
Staff Pick: Mulheres no mundo da tecnologia
For Portuguese-speaking developers, GitHub Developer Advocate Pachi Parra suggests Mulheres no mundo da tecnologia, a non-code repository that profiles women in technology. Though it contains no code, it presents a growing list that spans from Ada Lovelace to modern Brazilian computer scientist Nina Da Hora.
As Parra puts it, open source contributions don’t always have to involve code. The project serves as a reminder that documentation, curation, and community-building are all legitimate ways to give back. Contributions take the form of pull requests adding new entries to the list of women featured in the project.
