Hi everyone, I'm Anita, a freelance UX Designer based in Berlin. I learned about OpenRefine from @antonin_d at FOSS Backstage earlier this year. I particularly love research-based, community-minded design, and I'd love to find ways to contribute here 
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@daziff, welcome to the forum. I apologize for the delayed response. For support requests, please open a new thread in the Support category so it is more visible to the rest of the community.
@asengupta, welcome to the forum. Thanks for your interest in OpenRefine. If you are interested in a specific design project, feel free to start a new discussion in the Design proposals section to get feedback from the community.
We also have a contributing as a designer guide to help you with the first steps.
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Hey just found out about Open Refine. I work in Ecommerce and constantly have to cleanse bad product and analytics data. Hoping to find some reusable recipes and workflow ideas to streamline my processes and get some time back.
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Hi and welcome @Ad_Casey !
Don't underestimate Facets. Use them first to find patterns of inconsistencies.
Regex can be used inside a lot of GREL functions, but we also have other String functions that are useful without knowing or resorting to Regex, such as contains() , startsWith() etc. One of my favorites is rpartition() "reverse partition" to start splitting things out from the end instead of beginning of strings, to hack away suffixes or partitioning by dashes - in model numbers, etc. For example, to have a column with primary product model sequences without those suffixes (in some cases, the suffixes are used for variations on a product, like color, size, etc.)
At a minimum, I'd view the first few tutorials we have listed on External resources | OpenRefine
Curious how or where did you first find out about OpenRefine?
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Hi Thad,
Thanks for those initial tips, very helpful
How I first heard about OpenRefine... I use ChatGPT a lot to help me find solutions.
I explained a data cleansing issue and asked it to recommend software and resources to help bulk cleanse or automate aspects of my cleansing tasks.
It highlighted OpenRefine in its response under a list of recommended software solutions for the early parts of my cleansing process.
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Hi Everyone,
I am Sunil, software engineer by profession. I came across OpenRefine while looking for open source projects to contribute. I have made 5 contributions over the last couple of months and loving the challenges and big shout out to @antonin_d & @tfmorris, you really make a difference.
Looking forward to making more contributions ....
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Hi @Sunil_Natraj Thanks for the contributions and welcome!
Curious, what do you typically love working on or with? Where are your interest areas usually? (HTML, CSS, JAVA, Networking, Docs, other stuff or tech stacks like?)
Hi @thadguidry I work with Java mostly, can do some amount of frontend work too, also have worked with LLM recently.
Hi Everyone,
Iām Jashan, a Java developer passionate about open-source projects and backend development. I recently started exploring OpenRefine and am impressed by its capabilities in data cleaning and transformation.
Iām eager to contribute, especially in areas like enhancing the backend. Iād appreciate guidance on beginner-friendly issues or ways to get involved.
Looking forward to collaborating and learning from you all!
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Hi @Jashan_Goyal !
First review our Docs on Contributing in areas (Our Docs are built with Docusaurus.io in our other repo and you can use the left panel sidebar for pages, as well as right panel for quickly navigating to sections of each page)
Technical Reference - Contributing
For issues to work on, we have some GitHub Issues already labeled as "good first issues" or "help wanted", just look at our Issues and along its top, filter by the Label 
or maybe better yet, just click on 
Labels in top right corner and type in search box, or scroll through them.
Good labels for Java coders might be:
bug
tests
grel
Module: Backend
or combining labels, with like Bug and Help Wanted such as this link
There's a particularly nice one, that's not too hard, and even pays you $100 for your effort (sponsored by me), so how's that for a great starter bonus?!?!? :
If you are adventurous and know a bit about Boolean logic and Short-circuiting functions - or want to learn more? - then you can review this GREL OR() issue and think of the original poster's problem, reproduce it, and read through others opinions in the issue, and mentioned related issues, and try to come up with a solution, write up your proposed solution in a comment in the issue, link screenshots, external design docs, whatever, that you think would explain the solution well to other contributors that would solve the OP's problem as simply as possible (NOTE: we like to keep GREL to be easy-to-use syntax to use for our users, since OpenRefine is primarily designed for non-programmers)
Finally, you might want to peruse through our Forum's channel, click --> Development & Design <-- and feel free to post or open a new thread there if you need help on ANYTHING.