It All Started With A Patch

Getting into open source

A presentation by Oliver Davies (@opdavies)
https://joind.in/talk/98504

Oliver Davies

  • Senior Developer at Appnovation Technologies
  • Open source enthusiast
  • Working with OSS full-time since 2010
  • Drupal core contributor, mentor, module maintainer.
  • One of over 3,800 contributors to Drupal 8 to date

Why Contribute to Open Source?

  • Pay it forward
    “There's a module for that.”
  • Be part of a community
    “If you work in open source you get thousands of extra colleagues”
  • Be a better developer
  • Better career prospects
  • Recognition

Getting Started

Mentoring

  • Assist new and inexperienced contributors.
  • Mentored code sprints.
  • IRC/Slack office hours.
  • https://www.drupal.org/core-mentoring
  • https://php-mentoring.org
  • Google Summer of Code

Types of Contribution

  • Report/fix a bug
  • Review an existing patch, help diagnose an issue
  • Write a test
  • Documentation updates
  • Translations
  • Test a new release
  • Write a blog post, record a screencast

Finding Something to Work On

  • Start with something small.
  • Novice tag on Drupal.org.
  • up-for-grabs and first-timers-only tags on GitHub.
  • http://yourfirstpr.github.io
  • http://www.firsttimersonly.com

Making Changes

Patches

  • One canonical version
  • Clone the repository
  • Make and commit changes locally
  • Create a patch file (git diff, git format-patch)
  • Patch uploaded to issue queue and reviewed

Pull Requests

  • Multiple versions
  • Fork the repository
  • Make, commit, push changes
  • Create PR
  • PR is reviewed

Takeaways

  • Reviewers and maintainers are not scary (honest!).
  • People are reviewing the code, not reviewing you.
  • Not all changes will be accepted.
  • Be aware of different workflows, guidelines per project.
    README, CONTRIBUTING.md files.
  • Engage with the community.
  • Contribute in person if possible (code sprints/hackathons).

Questions?



Feedback

https://joind.in/talk/98504