What Open Source Clojure Projects Does Brave Clojure Recommend for Contributors?

Brave Clojure points readers to a curated set of open source Clojure projects described as well documented and actively seeking new contributors. The site presents this as a way to improve your skills and get involved in the community, but it does not name the individual projects on the page itself — the list sits behind the "Open Source Clojure Projects" section, so you need to visit braveclojure.com to see the current entries. Use this page when you already know some Clojure and want a low-friction first contribution; if you are still learning the language, start with the book first.

What the site actually says

The page makes three claims about its open source section:

• The projects are well documented.
• They are actively seeking new contributors.
• Contributing is framed as a way to improve your skills and get involved in the community.

That is the full extent of the description in the available page text. There is no list of repository names, no difficulty ratings, and no stated selection criteria beyond documentation quality and openness to newcomers.

How to use the section

1. Go to braveclojure.com and open the Open Source Clojure Projects section from the main navigation.
2. Read each project's description and follow the link to its repository.
3. Before writing code, check the repository's own contribution guide, issue labels (look for "good first issue" or similar), and recent commit activity.
4. Pick one small issue, comment that you intend to work on it, and submit a pull request.

Expected result: you end up in a project whose maintainers have already signaled they want help, rather than cold-emailing an inactive repository.

What to verify yourself

Because the site's description is brief, treat the following as your own checks rather than guarantees:

If a listed project fails these checks, it may simply have gone quiet since the page was last updated — the recommendation is a starting point, not a live status feed.

Where this fits in the broader site

Brave Clojure bundles several resources for people building Clojure skills:

• Clojure for the Brave and True — the free online book, also available via Amazon and No Starch Press, covering Lisp and functional programming fundamentals.
• Brave Clojure Jobs — described as the first and only job board just for Clojurians, for both job seekers and employers.
• Brave Clojure Quests — planned instructional material on deeper topics; the first quest on parallel programming and Clojure's reducers library is described as coming soon.
• The Clojure Atom — a bi-weekly email with one link to a free instructional resource, described as in preparation.

For contribution purposes, the open source section is the direct route; the book supplies the background you need to be useful in a repository.

A realistic first-contribution scenario

Suppose you have finished the core chapters of the book and can read Clojure code comfortably. You open the open source section, pick a project, and find an issue asking for a documentation fix or a small bug patch. You fork the repo, make the change, run the project's tests, and open a pull request. The value here is not the size of the change but the loop: reading someone else's codebase, matching its style, and responding to review. That loop is what the site is pointing you toward when it says contributing improves your skills.

Limits to keep in mind

The page does not state how often the project list is updated, whether projects are vetted beyond documentation and contributor openness, or what skill level each project assumes. It also gives no timeline for the Quests content beyond "pretty soon." Treat the recommendations as a starting shortlist and confirm each project's current state on its own repository before committing time.