Go project with thousands of stars seeks new contributors: details

Major open source Go (Golang) project seeks contributors

The Golang developer community received an important announcement: one of the most prominent open source projects in the Go ecosystem has officially announced a search for new contributors. The project in question is Docker / BuildKit — a powerful engine for building container images, used by millions of developers worldwide.

The maintainer team emphasizes that the project has reached a stage of active feature scaling. They need specialists ready to work on new capabilities, performance optimization, and documentation improvements.

What does the project offer?

• High load and real production experience. BuildKit processes thousands of builds per minute on major CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI).
• Modern stack. The project is written entirely in Go, uses protobuf for the API, and contains complex logic for working with file systems (snapshotter, overlayfs) and parallel task execution.
• Friendly community. Code reviews are conducted within 24–48 hours, and newcomers are assigned a mentor from among the maintainers.
• Opportunity to influence the industry. BuildKit is the de facto standard for building containers in the Docker ecosystem.

What tasks await new participants?

• Developing new exporters and frontends (LLB nodes).
• Optimizing layer caching and speeding up incremental builds.
• Porting to new platforms (ARM64, RISC-V).
• Improving the CLI interface and supporting new output formats.
• Writing unit and integration tests (Go testing + Testcontainers).

Requirements for candidates

The maintainers note that it is not necessary to be an expert in containerization. Confident knowledge of Go, understanding of concurrency (goroutines, channels, sync primitives), and a desire to delve into complex systems are sufficient. Experience with Linux namespaces, cgroups, or file systems is a plus.

How to join?

1. Fork the repository moby/buildkit on GitHub.
2. Study CONTRIBUTING.md — it describes the rules for formatting commits and PRs in detail.
3. Choose a task from the Good First Issue or Help Wanted section.
4. Create a Pull Request, after first discussing the changes in Issues.

The project especially welcomes newcomers — a special channel #new-contributors has been created for them in the Docker Community Slack chat. There you can ask any question without fear of being misunderstood.

Why is this important for the Go community?

Participating in such a project is not just a line on your resume, but also an opportunity to study the internal workings of tools used by millions. You will see how Go handles high-load tasks, how distributed build systems are structured, and how to maintain code that runs 24/7 without interruption.

If you write in Go and want to try your hand at open source — now is the best time. BuildKit is actively developing, and the team is ready to spend time onboarding new contributors.