Finding projects

[afeld]

Am chatting with @mntj, who is looking to get involved in some open source projects. I mentioned that more and more projects are using the help wanted label, so he could start combing through those, but that it's also a lot easier to get involved in projects/libraries that you already use. What if there were a site that scanned your Gemfiles, package.jsons, etc. on GitHub, then showed you the related help wanted Issues? (the code, site, or API of http://libraries.io/ might come in handy here.)

I also mentioned in #1 (comment) that issues may benefit from a neweng (a.k.a. beginner friendly) label, and @gbinal and I were discussing today that there may be a benefit at a project level, a.k.a. projects that don't require a lot of extra context, understanding of outside systems, etc. This could also take the form of organizations (or even in a sibling repository to this one) highlighting projects that are open to coaching new developers through contributing, a la 24 Pull Requests, Code Montage, etc.

Other ideas?

/cc @andrew

[orta]

We've been wanting to explore this on CocoaPods, the difficulty is being able to let people know that we'd help mentor and get people up and running with easy issues.

@dbgrani I believe spent some time on a website that would collect a lot of these classes of labels and would centralise the search, and allow someone to choose based on the language that they're learning with.

[afeld]

Nice! Yeah, I think difficulty labels (or similar) can go a long way.

[albacoretuna]

What about sone screen casts capturing the whole process? If experienced users made some videos covering finding an issue, up to solving and sending the pull request it would be helpful and encouraging.

[coreyleveen]

I think that screen casts are a fantastic idea.

@afeld Love your idea of creating a site for the purpose of learning how to contribute to open source. Perhaps it could also feature the screen casts @omidfi mentioned.

Aidan, I also think your neweng tag idea would be great. Could be useful for prioritization for experienced developers as well. If it caught on by others, perhaps GitHub could support it at some point with a new feature.

[ultrasaurus]

I've used a "starter" label -- meaning if you are new to the project, this is an easy one, though in general, "help wanted" means that we think someone without any context about the project can dive in (aside from what's in the README, contributing guidelines, etc)

In teaching (mostly RailsBridge), I've found "beginner" to be a problematic label (which I think "neweng" would share) -- is someone new to programming or new to the project?

[andrew]

I started a project called Contribulator a couple months ago to help surface GitHub projects that appear more friendly to contributors.

It calculates a score for a github repo based on a number of things, like the existence of CONTRIBUTING.MD, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md and LICENSE files as well as the presense of tests, open issues and other things, for example here's the project analysis of itself: https://contribulator.herokuapp.com/andrew/contribulator

There's lots more to add, existence of labels like "help wanted" and average time to response on issues but I think it has some promise.

The source code is on GitHub: https://github.com/andrew/contribulator, we're planning on using it to generate better recommendations for 24 Pull Requests at the end of the year as well.

[afeld]

I'm going to start keeping a tally of "ideas Aidan came up with but @andrew already built."

😻

[tute]

I like contribulator! Tried to sign up my projects (tute/merit, doorkeeper-gem/doorkeeper) but after granting permission it responds with a 500 error, @andrew.

[andrew]

Hi @tute, I got a bugsnag notification about it, it appears we hit the db row limit on heroku postgres, I'll sort it out as soon as I finish work this evening and update you.

[tute]

No rush, thank you for Contribulator and the fast response!

[andrew]

@tute it's working again now, I added doorkeeper for you: https://contribulator.herokuapp.com/doorkeeper-gem/doorkeeper

If you have any other suggestions for improvements please do drop your thoughts in an issue: https://github.com/andrew/contribulator/issues

Happy Friday 🎉

[tute]

I love that project. Happy Friday! 😍