Post on 14-Jul-2015
Contributing to Open Source 101
X C o n f G u r g a o n ' 1 4
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Our Journey
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What we thought it was
● Find a project
● Find bugs
● Send Patch/Pull Request
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Why?What?
How?When?
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Why?The reasons we wanted to contribute
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● Awesome workplace● A lot of activities● Challenging projects● Something missing!
Why?
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Our reasons● Give back to the community
● Become Immortal
● Reach
● Be part of a change/Be disruptive
● Network
● Become a better developer
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Other Driving Factors
● Profile
● Fame
● Travel
● Solving a problem
● Improving solutions
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What?Next Steps...
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(Now) What?Umm.. Where do we start...
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Inception
● We tried learning about a lot of projects.
● Rust, Servo, KDE, Firefox ...
● Even tried learning the languages
● Failed. Frustrated.
● Work: 0 Time: A lot
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Why did we fail?
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#Fail
✗ Had never used it
✗ Only judged by impact
✗ Picked projects with giant learning curves
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Seeking help
● IRC
● Blogs
● Meetups in Delhi/NCR
● We met RMS!
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Know Thyself
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Know Thy Interests
● Pick something you use
● Something you care about
● Something that will annoy you if it doesn't work
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How?Techniques and Tools
21www.openhatch.org
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Know Thy Project
● Use it. And keep using it.
● Understand the itch
● Talk to contributors on IRC/IRL
● Talk to users
● Read Mailing Lists
● Needs and Wants
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Funny picture about learning
curves
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Starting Point
● KDE: 'Junior Jobs'
● Mozilla: 'Mentored Bugs' and 'Good First Bugs'
● Github: Tags ('Easy' etc)
● Take your pick
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Know Thy Code
● Obtain source code
● Build
● Run tests
● Play with it. Explore.
● Read wikis
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Tools picWrong tools mishap
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Know thy tools
● Start with no tools
● Explore tools for specific problems
● Ask seasoned contributors
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Know Thy Community
● KDE: Active user and developer community in India
● Mozilla: Developers vs Contributors
● Sketch-UI: Scratch your own itch
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Know Thy Etiquettes
● Volunteers usually have other jobs
● Give descriptive feedback
● RTFM
● Spell-check
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All set? Now get your hands dirty!
Another funny pic here. Omg. Kill me. Now.
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When?Where is the time to do anything at all !!
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Spend Thy Time
● Find company
● Make it a regular thing
● Doesn't always work the way you thought it would
● After-hours
● Weekends
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www.codetriage.com
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CODE!Getting familiar with the codebase
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It's not going to work the first time. And it'll be a while till you get the hang of things.
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Code -> Review
● Follow code guidelines
● KDE: Review board
● Mozilla: Bugzilla
● Properly formatted patches
● Build bigger features in increments. TEST!
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Check in
● Run tests locally
● Mozilla: Run on Try Servers
● Write a beautiful commit message
● Rinse, Repeat
● Get approval on patch
● Check In final patch
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Nope.
- Albert Einstein on reading our first patch to
Firefox
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Immortality
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Pitfalls
● Too scared to ask questions
● Didn't dedicate time
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What we thought it was
● Find a project
● Find bugs
● Send Patch/Pull Request
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(11)2 to (11)
10 Rules
<Insert Awkward Laughter Here />
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(11)10
Steps
● Know Thyself
● Know Thy Interests
● Know Thy Project
● Know Thy Code
● Know Thy Tools
● Know Thy Community
● Know Thy Etiquettes
● Spend Thy Time
● While true: (Code →Review)
● Check-in
● Achieve Immortality
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Learnings
● Contributions != Code
● You can start your own project if you have an itch that can't be scratched with the help of TWers
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Nagging Questions
● Why do we not see people regularly contributing? (Outside work related software)
● Why the aversion to free software?
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We ended up contributing to:
Sketch-UI, Mozilla, KDE
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What's next?
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THANKS
Paras Narang
@parasnarang
Rishab Arora
@spacetime29