Contributing

Hello, I am a javascript/python developer that uses his voice to code every day. As such, I feel that this is an important project and would love to help out any way I could. Looking through your issues, you have a priority system that is different than what I am used to. How can I help/Where should I start?

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Awesome! At this point, there is so much to do that pretty much anything you find interesting would be helpful. If there is a feature youā€™d like to see implemented, file a bug (or discuss it here), and if it seems like a good idea you can work on it. Or, if there is an issue that strikes your fancy, comment on the bug that youā€™d like to work on it.

You can ignore our priority system for now, this is just our wild guess on what our small team should work on first. If you tell me what interests you most (front-end animation, backend processing, bug fixing, etc), I can suggest a thing or too.

Hi there!

Iā€™m also considering to contribute some coding help to the project, but I find it difficult to figure out where best to start, and what the procedure is (if any).

For example: in the repo README, you have a link to the ā€œhelp wantedā€ issues, but many of them are also tagged ā€œtriageā€, so Iā€™m not sure if they need further work/investigation by maintainers before ā€œdrive by contributorsā€ can hack away at them?

Are there plans to put together some contribution guidelines to gather this kind of information? If there arenā€™t yet, Iā€™d be happy to create an issue for that :wink:

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Hi @nevik,

Thanks for your interest. Yup, those Help Wanted issues are the best place to start. I didnā€™t realize the triage tag would throw people off, so Iā€™ve removed all the ā€˜triageā€™ tags from help-wanted bugs.

Are there plans to put together some contribution guidelines to gather this kind of information? If there arenā€™t yet, Iā€™d be happy to create an issue for that :wink:

Indeed we do have some plans to up our contributor story game, but probably not for a few weeks at least. When you say ā€œcontributor guidelines,ā€ what were you thinking of adding? Also, having a bug filed never hurts :slight_smile:

Hi @mhenretty,

thanks for getting back to me :slight_smile:

I was thinking something along what other OSS projects use, and what GitHub recommends to be in a CONTRIBUTING file.

Some of the points I think would be great to mention there:

  • points and methods of communicating with the team/maintainers
    • e.g. GH issues for bug reports/feature requests, Discourse for more general discussion, whatever real-time chat avenue comes out of our other conversation
  • more details on setting up the local development environment
    • list of software required (e.g. MySQL isnā€™t currently mentioned anywhere)
    • versions required (esp. Node and npm, see #423)
    • where configuration goes, and what needs to be configured to get up and running; possibly also where to get backend/DB and AWS credentials (see also: #427)
    • some of these technical details could also be extracted to another file (main README or a readme in another folder, or another file entirely), and referenced from CONTRIBUTING
  • where to start in terms of things to change/fix/add
    • filter for ā€œhelp wantedā€ issues on GH
    • ignore the ā€œtriageā€ tag (or not? otherwise indicate how you use and interpret the triage tag, and how this affects "ready for development)

While I started issue #423 with a more narrow request, it could be broadened to starting contribution guidelines.

Otherwise, Iā€™m also happy to open another ticket ā€“ just thought I didnā€™t want to flood your inbox over the weekend :wink:

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Thanks for you thoughts here @Nevik! Letā€™s continue the discussion in the bug, where we can start to make some of these changes.