Contributing to open source

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How to contribute to open source Jonathan Fielding @jonthanﬁelding

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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

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Why contribute • Make the web a better place • Help improve the open source code you use • Inﬂuence the direction a project takes

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How to contribute

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Document a feature

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• 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

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Write a blog post

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• Write about a OS project • Write a tutorial or just some notes • Help promote project and help others to use it

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Get involved in discussions

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• Discuss use cases of an OS project • Discuss potential new features

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Raise a bug

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• 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

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Fix a bug

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• 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

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Add a feature

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• Add a new feature that is useful for OS project to have • Look at similar projects to see where this project is lacking

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Optimise or Refactor

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• Optimise the existing code • Refactor sections of the code

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Finding a project to contribute to

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Look at your favourite projects

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jQuery • bug tracker - http://bugs.jquery.com/ • Has about 80 open tickets • Has 7 TODO items in the source

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Twitter Bootstrap • bug tracker - https://github.com/ twbs/bootstrap/issues • Has 58 open tickets • Has 2 TODO items in the source

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Chromium • bug tracker - https:// code.google.com/p/chromium/ issues/list • Has about 61101 open tickets

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Find projects looking for help

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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/

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Open Hatch • Matches you with open source projects that need help • Search for issues by difﬁculty or skill https://openhatch.org/

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GitHub Trending • Lists the trending Github repos • Lists the trending Github developers https://github.com/trending

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Starting your own open source project

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What is your project going to do?

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Who is the project for?

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Before Starting

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Find Contributors • Discuss your project with other developers online • Find others interested in developing this new project

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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

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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

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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

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Project Startup

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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)

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Ensure your project has the following • License • Read me / instructions for use

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Optional nice to haves • A website • Comprehensive documentation • A domain name for easy ﬁnding

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Promote project • Post on Reddit • Tweet it to your followers • Write about it on your blog and as guest posts on other blogs

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Ongoing

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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

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Engage Community • Engage the users of your OS project • Discuss improvements they would like to see

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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

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Rounding up

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So go contribute

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• 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