Guide to make a real contribution to an open source project for novice

Goal

You will be guided to make a real contribution to an open source project (coala). The skills you learn are generally applicable.

Prerequisite

1. Eager to contribute to open source.
2. Willingness to do great things in python
3. GitHub account
4. Git and Python installed
5. A laptop

Overview

• Talk about version control (specifically Git). Basic stuffs like setup git and commands like fork/clone, pull/fetch, push, commit/ammend, squash etc. We’ll be following learning by doing paradigm. Approx 15 minutes.
• Introduce people to coala in general, brief about its codebase and how to use Github to contribute to coala. Approx 15 minutes.
• Get started to write some code. We’ll have bunch of unassigned issues, specifically created for the purpose of workshop, show people how developers collaborate, cover git commands in more detail and the pull requests from attendees. Approx 1.30 hrs. We’ll also talk in brief about quality/testing tools like Travis Ci, CircleCi, Gitmate etc. In the meantime we’ll start reviewing the PRs. Approx 20 minutes.
• Finally, reworking the code phase and get every attendees merge their contributions to master branch.