A good place to start would be with a project you use already. The best things to do to start are to look for a CONTRIBUTING.MD file in the repository and read it. You might also need to sign an agreement ( CLA ), depending on the project. Once you have got to grips with what is required in order to contribute, look at the issues and see what people are requesting. If you already have something in mind, first consider if other people would benefit from it before opening a PR, otherwise pick something that seems useful and get started.

You can't really draw a comparison between synchronous and asynchronous as it doesn't really make for a fair comparison. Every option on the market has a purpose and it's place, it's down to you to find the one that fits your requirements the best. TL;DR - Pick the right tool for the job.

Break your stylesheet up into components ( known as modularizing ) based on what they do, for example form styles could belong in a forms.css. @import 'forms.css'; You could also benefit from one of the many pre-processors available such as LESS , Sass and Stylus which can help you break things down into files as well as a bunch of other neat things.

Try and keep effects simple; the more complicated they get, the more resources they tend to use. Keep that in mind and you should be fine. The worst effects in terms of performance seem to be blur and 3D but sometimes opacity has been known to degrade performance.

Personally i find SmartGit one of the best but recently GitKraken was made available to the general public and is gaining traction fast.

Node isn't necessarily better but like all technologies has it's place and it's up to those businesses to find what suites there needs the best. TL;DR - Pick the right tool for the job.

Meteor is a full stack framework which restricts you to building the front and backend inside Meteor. The problem with this workflow is if you have an API that you simply want to hook up to an interface, then this framework is out of the question and likely will limit it's popularity despite being an excellent framework.

Even in it's early stages, this oozes potential and certainly is one project to keep your eyes firmly glued on.