Contribute
The Open Vector is free because people like you help keep it that way. There are two ways to contribute: your skills, or your support.
What We Need
Content Editors
Review and improve existing lessons for clarity, accuracy, and flow. Every lesson is a markdown file you can edit in any text editor or markdown app. Fix explanations that do not land, tighten prose, catch gaps in logic, submit a PR.
Lesson Authors
Write new lessons from real experience. Create a markdown file with frontmatter, write your content using standard markdown plus our custom block types, and add it to the manifest. If you have built with AI agents, you have something to teach.
Guide Writers
Create Approach guides from field experience. Practical, opinionated walkthroughs of real workflows, prompting strategies, debugging patterns, project scaffolding, team coordination.
Translators
Help bring the Open Vector to other languages. The content system is built for internationalization. If you are fluent in another language and passionate about design education, we need you.
Accessibility Reviewers
Audit the platform for accessibility. Screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, color contrast, motion sensitivity, if you have expertise in a11y, the Open Vector needs your eyes.
Community Ambassadors
Share the Open Vector, gather feedback, represent the project in your communities. Write about it, talk about it, bring back what people need. The best products are shaped by the people who use them.
Not ready to apply? Get notified about founding contributor opportunities.
Standing on Open Shoulders
Everything you use as a technologist, designer, or creator today was built on a foundation of openly shared work. Linux powers most of the internet. Git, the tool you use to manage every project, was built by Linus Torvalds and given away. React, Node, VS Code, Python, PostgreSQL, the entire modern web stack, open source, all of it.
Richard Stallman argued decades ago that software should be free, not free as in "no cost," but free as in freedom. The freedom to study it, modify it, share it. That philosophy became the Free and Open Source Software movement. It changed everything. Not because corporations decided to be generous, but because individuals contributed what they could. A patch here, a bug report there, documentation, testing, funding.
The Open Vector exists in that tradition. This is not a product. It is a shared resource, built openly, improved collectively. The curriculum, the guides, the tools, they belong to the community that uses them. Like the projects that inspired it, the Open Vector runs on contributions from the people it serves.
Contribute Code & Content
The Open Vector is a GitHub project. Every lesson and guide is a standard markdown file in the content/ directory. Fork the repo, edit in any text editor, and submit a pull request. No special tools or build steps required.
Edit Existing Lessons
Found a typo? A broken link? An explanation that could be clearer? Every lesson is a markdown file you can open in any editor. Fork the repo, edit the .md file, submit a PR. The content/README.md in the repo explains the format.
Write New Lessons or Guides
Have expertise in an area the curriculum does not cover yet? Create a new .md file with frontmatter, write your content, and add the slug to manifest.yaml. The best contributions come from people who have done the thing and want to teach others how.
Improve the Platform
The site itself is React, Vite, and Netlify. If you are a developer and you see a performance issue, an accessibility gap, or a feature that would help learners, build it. This is how open source works.
Report Issues
Not a coder? That is fine. If something is confusing, broken, or missing, open a GitHub issue. Bug reports and feedback are contributions too. Every issue filed makes the platform better for the next person.
Donations & Support
The Open Vector is a non-profit project. There is no company behind this, no venture funding, no ad revenue. It is one person building a free learning platform because it should exist.
The real costs (Supabase, Netlify, domain registration, the Claude API that powers the chat) come out of my pocket. In the grand scheme of things, it is not a life-altering expense. But these projects can quietly run a few hundred dollars a month. There are no sponsors, no ads, no monetization. Along with the time, the stewardship, and the effort to build and maintain all of this.
I am not going to pretend anyone is "buying me a coffee." But if you have ever gotten something useful out of the Open Vector, a concept that clicked, a guide that saved you hours, a conversation with the AI tutor that pointed you in the right direction, you could donate $5, $10, the amount of a lunch. That is genuinely what we are talking about here. A few dollars offsets the hosting. A few more covers the API. It adds up.
What donations cover
- Supabase (database + authentication)
- Netlify (hosting + deployment)
- Domain registration
- Claude API costs (the AI chat is not free to run)
- Any future infrastructure as the platform grows
What donations do not cover
- My time. That is already given freely.
- Content. The curriculum will always be free, for everyone, no paywalls.
If you can chip in, amazing. If you cannot, use the platform, that is what it is here for.
"In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny."— Linus Torvalds
The Open Vector is yours. Use it, improve it, share it, sustain it. That is how open source has always worked, and it is how we will keep building, together.