On 2015-12-05 5:44 PM, Adam McGreggor wrote:
Since we get a lot of GSoC student aspirants and folk who meet one of us and think "these seem like nice people, maybe I'll make my first open source contribution with them," I think there's good reason to have something a bit more extensive than the existing CONTRIBUTE stuff.
I imagine there's content that's available already, too, for My First Project, for some reason, I'm thinking it's the sort of thing Mozilla will have done a fair few iterations on (and will be nicely licensed).
Yes, such content exists, and we can link to some of it, but it's typically too general for a beginner who doesn't yet know how to handle that. I spend literally hundreds of hours a year talking to students about where they get stuck as new contributors as part of my role as the Python GSoC coordinator, plus I hang out in the OpenHatch channel (they're one of many orgs that works to make the "how do i get started?" docs better) and I hear the "I got this far but then there were no architecture docs and I got overwhelmed" and variants on it a lot.
We need those architecture docs and that bridging stuff that goes from "how to github" to "what does mailman want in a pull request and how many tests do I need to include if I want to make Barry happy?"
It's a moot point to argue about it, anyhow. Either I write this now for the website or I write it 40 times on IRC in February while the students complain that I'm not answering them fast enough, and I know which one I'd prefer! ;)
Terri