First Timers Only (opens in new tab)

similar :

Mozilla "Mentor Bugs If you are looking for a bug with guidance, we maintain a set of bugs that are marked with an assigned mentor (see "Whiteboard" field). The mentor will help you get the necessary information to understand the issue, point out relevant parts of the code to look at, etc. You can browse these bugs on Bugs Ahoy!, but here's a list of unassigned mentor bugs to get you started:"

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Get_Involved#Mentor_Bugs

Other examples:

#easyfix: https://github.com/facebook/flow/labels/easyfix

#beginner: https://github.com/eslint/eslint/labels/beginner

#exp:beginner https://github.com/docker/docker/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss...

As a true open-source zero timer, I can't quite figure out what PR means. My gut was "pull request" but it sounds like you're "committing a fix" at this point, so I suppose "push request" might be the answer, but it's an ambiguous pair of letters.

As a bit of a nitpick, I find it slightly ironic that this article uses TDD and PR as unexplained abbreviations.

There are a lot of ways to contribute that don't involve making pull requests. Identifying and raising issues is a good place to start for someone who is not familiar with the codebase.

Great read. My favorite part is this bullet point:

> Use npm scripts so people don’t have to understand or globally install any build tools

I do this on every project I work on. In fact, where possible, I completely skip globals entirely (for instance in my msngr.js library it uses Grunt but it executes grunt locally without it being installed globally on the machine).

I think it's really important that anyone can go up to a library, pull it down, and start it with little to no further effort. The less friction you can provide a developer the better.

... and this is a prime example of the "developer ergonomics" v. "end-user needs" trade-off that was being discussed a few days ago re: web frameworks.

I mean, it's very well possible that the long-term investment in expanding the "base" of willing coders is worth the short-term loss in productivity. But even long-term investments in human capital need better planning than just "hey, I bet a high-schooler could deal with this simple accounting spreadsheet; that would train him even if it takes him a day to fix what I can fix in ten minutes". It's fine investing in high-schoolers, sure, but that's not the point.

Jenkins has been filling my twitter feed with information for new contributors lately under the hashtag #hacksgiving I think.

Edit: Changed "spamming" to "filling" That was meant as a positive thing but I guess I shouldn't have used the word spamming.

Huh? Says I posted this 2 hours ago, but I'm pretty sure I posted it yesterday

As far as I can tell this information is specific to Github and development on Github.

Why is CONTRIBUTING.md important? Its just another file for someone to read alongside COPYING, INSTALL, README, TODO, and perhaps what's in the doc/ directory. And why markdown?

Organising and comments are good but people have been trying to get devs to do that for decades and we're still mentioning it.

"Add an up-for-grabs label" to what? Where? How will people see this?

Adding a githook might be useful on a remote repository but I don't want to run a full test suite every time I commit, ammend a commit, rebase, or otherwise trigger it.

What's NPM? Why would anyone use it over a makefile?

I would extend my first comment and say this is for javascript projects which use Github and only Github.

At elementary OS we have "elementary Drive By Contributors" :) https://launchpad.net/~elementary-driveby

I love this.

I've been thinking about a very similar issue for a while now, and I'm still trying to organize my thoughts into a blog post or something, but here's the basic idea:

Hire more juniors. Or cross-train people from other departments[1]. Doesn't really matter who. But they should be pretty darn close to beginners.

Assign a relatively small issue to them. The kind of thing that would only take about an hour for a more senior dev to look in to. Plan more than an hour for the junior. Probably a lot more. Also plan some time for one of those more senior devs. Sit them down next to each other.

Point the junior to the readme. Ask the junior to ping / poke / bother the senior every time they hit a roadblock. Every single time. Ask them to be relentlessly persistent. (Not everyone's good at being relentlessly persistent. So encourage them. Create an environment where they feel like they can be relentlessly persistent.) Then leave them alone.

Give it a day or two. Watch as interesting things start to happen.

Watch as the junior dev learns how to be a better communicator. Watch as they learn how to make problems visible. How to get help. And as an added bonus: how to program.

Watch as the senior dev goes insane at first from all the questions. Watch them start to wonder how they can avoid going through this every time somebody needs to touch their code. Watch them remove obstacles. Or at least reduce their number. Watch them automate things. Or speed up things that are already automated. Or improve processes in ways they had never even considered before sitting with the junior. Also watch them learn how to be a better communicator.

Do this a few times. Watch for magical things. Code quality improves. Onboarding times plummet. Hiring friction melts away. Teamwork starts... working. Productivity skyrockets. Job satisfaction goes up. Happiness prevails.

-----

[1] See also https://twitter.com/patio11/status/657902663686754304

We've a curated set of Pioneer Projects for MirageOS [1], where more established contributors have agreed to act as mentors for newcomers. It's worked really well for us!

One of the unexpected benefits was that we could quickly take part in things like Outreachy and GSoC, as we already had a curated list. Reviewing this list every few months has become part of the normal process now.

In addition, asking people to act as mentors also gives them a different perspective on the existing code base, especially where things are particularly thorny.

[1] https://github.com/mirage/mirage-www/wiki/Pioneer-Projects

Mentorship in OSS makes everyone involved a little bit better at something, be it following instructions, learning practical tooling, writing clear instructions, justification of process and habits, etc.

This is a really nice initiative, when I was starting with open source development I had no idea how to do what we needed to do and almost no project i talked to had any initiative like this where they keep some part of their project open for first timers like me, i had to struggle a lot to get started, it'd be great if more and more influential projects started to use this and if they were a little more open to feedback, of late I have noticed those who manage the project just don't listen to feedback what so ever.

Great idea.

I would add: if someone tries to do contribute something, but maybe they have a git issue, don't step in and push it yourself. This happened to me on one project, and it bothered me so much that I stopped contributing entirely (which was the right move, it turned out).

I think the KEY thing here is that you wrote the tests, that gave someone the 'confidence' to say whether or not they were even on the right track - this is amazing - the tests give exactly the right context for someone to dive into the code.

One thing that he left off his list of things to make contributing successful is seeking up a "docker" box which is ready to go for development.

(Or a vagrant file)

If the image is set up so it "just works" and has all tools preinstalled, you can be up and running locally in seconds.

With NPM scripts, its often possible to run I to problems with node-gyp... Or any other number of cross platform incompatiblities.

The docker/vagrant route is a really novel solution I've seen used effectively in other projects.

This is really great. I've contributed to lots of projects and it would be nice if maintainers were all this thoughtful. If not actively encouraging people to get involved, it would be nice of maintainers to simply acknowledge or appreciate someone's effort.

I've contributed a lot of code and have had vastly different experiences. Sometimes people are excited and accept a PR without question. Some people just ignore PRs. Some people make you feel as though you've just spit in their face. I had one pull request that I thought was reasonable which was met with a ridicule from the maintainer at how useless my idea was (to him). I'm a seasoned programmer with my own projects and a lot of code under my belt but, even knowing how these things work, that one really soured me on his project. I can't imagine if a novice who was excited at their first PR was treated so poorly.

If I could suggest anything to maintainers, it would be to simply appreciate that somebody was trying to contribute. If their code doesn't meet your goals or standards, try to still respect that they spent some time on your project.

A related effort: https://twitter.com/yourfirstpr

This world needs more people like you. Thank you !!

Along the same lines, I'd encourage everyone, first timers and grey beards alike to check out http://24pullrequests.com/ (they use a 'beginner' instead of 'first-timers-only' as their novice-friendly tag).

If you're in the Salt Lake area, also please consider joining us next Saturday [1] or Tuesday, Dec. 15 [2] as we give a little back to the Open Source community!

[1] SLC JS Learners - monthly JavaScript Study Group - http://www.meetup.com/SLC-JS-Learners/events/224563977/ [2] SLC JS Learners - monthly meetup - http://www.meetup.com/SLC-JS-Learners/events/226862778/

This titles man are worst than FB. Why not just "Click here!"?. Or could just copy and paste the title: "A suggestion to Open Source project maintainers"