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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https://github.com/pagekite/mailpile || www.mailpile.is

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THANKS

Paras Narang

@parasnarang

Rishab Arora

@spacetime29