Is Hadoop a good open-source project to join

Question

I've been learning Java for the last 2 months with a Core Java book. Now I want to write something real, but at first I decided that I need to improve my knoweledge about algorithms and data sturctures so I'm currently reading a book on that.

I want to join an open-source project which is mature enough to learn from it but is still growing so I can really contribute to it. I browsed the whole apache and sourceforge looking for something interesting and the project I became really excited about is Apache Hadoop. Although it's quite complicated I don't think it's going to be a problem if I'm interested enough.

So the question is: does anybody here has expereince contributing to Hadoop? What can you say? Is there enough room for futrher development?

Answer 1

Yes, Hadoop has a whole ecosystem of projects to get associated with. Like HDFS, Hadoop Map-Reduce, Pig, Hive, Oozie etc. You might poke around using any of the VMs available like http://www.cloudera.com/downloads/

This will help you get acquainted with what all different projects are involved and thereafter you can contribute to make things better.