First mission: Contributors page
Here is our experimental attempt to help you make “your first pull request”.
We created a page on our website that lists our contributors.
Your mission dear potential contributor, should you choose to accept it, is to fork our project, update this html page by adding your name and some optional details and send it to us as a pull request.
After reviewing it, we will publish your changes to our website with the next update and your mission will be completed.
Here are the links for exact steps:
Please note that tutorials only cover Windows, Visual Studio & Github Desktop scenario at the moment.
Why not an actual task?
Since we heard “your first pull request” idea, we were trying to find a suitable task for it.
This type of item should have following features:
Easy to accomplish: Amount of people that can complete the task will differ based on its difficulty. We would like to reach more people, so easiest tasks are the best. A filter, but that’s okay.
Nothing urgent: There shouldn’t be a time limit for this item, it shouldn’t bother us if it doesn’t get completed any time soon. This means that it cannot be a feature or a fix that must be delivered. Otherwise actual maintainers have to solve it; no task, no first pull request. Well, this narrows it bit down.
Preferably repeatable: If not, it means once the first task gets completed, we need to find another “easy” and “not urgent” task, which was already bit rare.
How many times can we find tasks that can pass these filters before the whole idea fades away, two times, three times?
As project maintainers, what we want is to grow a community, reach other developers, so they can explore our project, our story and get familiar with the inner structure.
If this will require us to keep finding rare gems, we are still not lowering the barriers enough.
Therefore we liked “Contributors page” approach; easy, not urgent and repeatable.
And in our case, even though we used the label in our issue list, it’s not required for you to be an actual “first-timer”.
If you are planning to make your first contribution to an open source project and you can find an issue for your level that has “first-timer-only” label, go and help that project first, we will be waiting for you.
Even if you had your first pull request, you are welcome to complete ours. This is “your first pull request, to our project”.
So, in the end, no filter on both sides, the door is always open to anyone.
In the long term, we are hoping to use a tutorial type of process for newcomers:
- Step 1: Edit an existing html page
- Step 2: Create a new project on our application
- Step 3: Update that project by using Web API
- Step 4: Delete that project through database queries
For now, if you will show an effort to run our project on your computer, that would be the most precious contribution we can have.
Would you like to be one of our contributors?
Is this kind of approach useful, or unnecessary? Is there anything we can improve? Or you liked it and want new missions?
Tell us what you think about our experiment.
Inspired by:
