Contributing to open source

Open source is a major part of our tool chain as web developers and we often take advantage of open source projects to jump start own projects. Open source thrives through the help of the larger community. Jonathan will be talking about how you can get started with giving back to existing projects and how you can start your own successful projects.

Transcript

1. How to contribute to open source Jonathan Fielding @jonthanfielding
2. About me • Technical Architect at Beamly • Have worked with large brands such as Sony, British Gas and Beamly • Been contributing to open source for 13 years • Made contributions to MiniCMS, SimpleStateManager, HTML5 Boilerplate, TweetCLI, Gitissu.es, DigitalOceanCLI, Doccy
3. Why contribute • Make the web a better place • Help improve the open source code you use • Influence the direction a project takes
4. How to contribute
5. Document a feature
6. • Often, not all the features of a OS project are documented • If you find an undocumented feature, why not document it • caveat, sometimes they are undocumented for a reason
7. Write a blog post
8. • Write about a OS project • Write a tutorial or just some notes • Help promote project and help others to use it
9. Get involved in discussions
10. • Discuss use cases of an OS project • Discuss potential new features
11. Raise a bug
12. • Look on the projects bug tracker to see if anyone else has had the issue • Create a repeatable test case (perhaps using JS Bin) • Raise a ticket in the projects bug tracker
13. Fix a bug
14. • Look at bug tracker and find an issue you want to fix • Fork project so you can make your changes • Fix issue and raise a pull request to the original repository so the project owner can merge your fix into the codebase
15. Add a feature
16. • Add a new feature that is useful for OS project to have • Look at similar projects to see where this project is lacking
17. Optimise or Refactor
18. • Optimise the existing code • Refactor sections of the code
19. Finding a project to contribute to
20. Look at your favourite projects
21. jQuery • bug tracker - http://bugs.jquery.com/ • Has about 80 open tickets • Has 7 TODO items in the source
22. Twitter Bootstrap • bug tracker - https://github.com/ twbs/bootstrap/issues • Has 58 open tickets • Has 2 TODO items in the source
23. Chromium • bug tracker - https:// code.google.com/p/chromium/ issues/list • Has about 61101 open tickets
24. Find projects looking for help
25. Code Triage • Sign up to receive an open issue in your inbox every day from your favourite repos • Find projects looking for help http://www.codetriage.com/
26. Open Hatch • Matches you with open source projects that need help • Search for issues by difficulty or skill https://openhatch.org/
27. GitHub Trending • Lists the trending Github repos • Lists the trending Github developers https://github.com/trending
28. Starting your own open source project
29. What is your project going to do?
30. Who is the project for?
31. Before Starting
32. Find Contributors • Discuss your project with other developers online • Find others interested in developing this new project
33. Or choose to go it alone • Have full control of the direction of the project • May make it harder for your project to gain traction as others might not agree with how it works
34. Choose how to licence your project • Users of your project want to know how they can use it • Many will want to use it commercially • Common licences include the MIT, Apache and BSD
35. Picking a name It should be: • Unique - to avoid confusion • Let the planned features inform the name of your project • Relevant - don’t call a Ruby project jCarousel as that suggests its JavaScript
36. Project Startup
37. Creating the project • Create your project on a source control provider of choice (most projects choose GitHub) • Commit initial commit of code ensuring no passwords are in the commit (this was my first OS mistake)
38. Ensure your project has the following • License • Read me / instructions for use
39. Optional nice to haves • A website • Comprehensive documentation • A domain name for easy finding
40. Promote project • Post on Reddit • Tweet it to your followers • Write about it on your blog and as guest posts on other blogs
41. Ongoing
42. Use semantic versioning Allows users of a project understand what sort of changes a release makes • 1.0.0 - Major release • 1.1.0 - Minor release • 1.1.1 - Bug fixes
43. Engage Community • Engage the users of your OS project • Discuss improvements they would like to see
44. Fix Bugs • No code is flawless so your users will raise bugs • Fix them promptly to help your users maintain faith in the quality of your project
45. Rounding up
46. So go contribute
47. • Learn how to make your sites responsive • Learn about useful open source tools that can help you build responsive sites fast Beginning Responsive Web Design