Contributing to Open Source John Blischak Greater Cleveland R Group 2019-08-28

About me Postdoctoral Scholar, Dept. Human Genetics Reproducibility with R Markdown and Git See jdblischak.com for more details

What is open source software?

Basics of open source software ■ Anyone can inspect, modify, and redistribute the source code ■ Anyone can run the software for any purpose ■ (Optional) Collaborative development ■ Requires approved open source license

“Free” vs “Open Source” ■ The Free Software Definition from the Free Software Foundation ■ The Open Source Definition from the Open Source Initiative ■ ”…nearly all free software is open source, and nearly all open source software is free.” – Richard Stallman

Pros and Cons Pros ■ Widely available ■ “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” – Linus’ Law ■ No vendor lock-in Cons ■ No instant customer support ■ Difficulties in long- term maintenance and sustainability

R is open source ■ Most CRAN packages are open source. Only 11 specify the field License_restricts_use

It’s already free, so why contribute?

Learning ■ Opportunity to learn directly from experienced software developers ■ Contributing to something used by others instead of working on an assigned example project

Networking ■ Be a part of a community ■ Meet others with similar interests

Prioritize your own interests ■ If you want a specific feature or need a particular bug fixed, you are the most motivated to get it done ■ Can be much quicker than waiting on others to do it for you

Contributing

Support other users ■ Answer questions on Stack Overflow or RStudio Community ■ Write a tutorial or blog post ■ Try to reproduce bug reports

Give recognition ■ Cite the software in academic papers and other official reports ■ Share on social media

Financial support ■ Support a project: R Foundation, Foundation for Open Access Statistics (FOAS), NumFOCUS ■ Support a developer: Patreon, Buy me a coffee ■ Lobby for your company to support open source (Tidelift, Quansight) or purchase enterprise versions of open source products

Build community ■ Organize and/or attend community events ■ Give a talk at a user group or conference

Writing code or documentation ■ Requires learning the development tools used by the project ■ Version control software, e.g. Git, Mercurial, SVN ■ Code hosting platform, e.g. GitHub, R-Forge, Bitbucket, GitLab

GitHub is popular for R devs

What is Git? ■ Tracks the changes made by each contributor (think Word Track Changes) ■ Logs each change with a unique ID (think ”Version history” in Google Drive) ■ Requires message

Fine-grained control of edits ■ Edit code file(s) ■ $  git  add ■ $  git  commit ■ $  git  push Analogy inspired by Greg Wilson

Collaboration via email

Collaboration on GitHub Fork Pull Request

Connecting to GitHub Fork Pull Request $  git clone Your computer $  git push

Example Pull Request octocat/Spoon-Knife GitHub Help: Fork a repo GitHub Guides: Forking projects

How to find projects ■ Search for R repositories: language:R ■ Search Issue labels – label:help-wanted – label:good-first-issue

Submit your first Pull Request ■ https://github.com/jdblischak/git-for-science

More advanced topics ■ Feature branch ■ Add tests ■ Contributor License Agreement (CLA)

Advice

Start small ■ To learn the technical and social aspects of contributing to a project, start with a small contribution like improving the documentation

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Assume the best in online interactions ■ Tone of voice is hard to decipher for text-based communication ■ To be safe, first confirm that a project has a Code of Conduct

Compare yourself to past you ■ Long-time contributors will know the reasoning for every quirk in the code base ■ This can easily inspire Imposter Syndrome ■ As you continue to participate, remind yourself how much you have personally learned over that time period

Due diligence ■ Read the README and any FAQs ■ Read the contributing instructions (CONTRIBUTING.md) ■ Search past discussions in Issue tracker or forum

Additional resources ■ Contributing to Open Source on GitHub for beginners by Kent C. Dodds ■ https://24pullrequests.com/ ■ Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel ■ How to Contribute to Open Source by Open Source Guides ■ Your first open source contribution: a step-by-step technical guide by Jen Weber ■ The Beginner’s Guide to Contributing to Open Source Projects by Andy Lester ■ The Definitive Guide to Contributing to Open Source by Piotr Gaczkowski

Questions?