- Goal: Demystify the scary part of contributing to an open source project
- Timeline: Within the first six weeks of you joining the lab
- Length: Approximately 500 words
The goal of this blogging exercise is to make sure that all members of the Whitaker lab are able to contribute to open source projects.
The brief is somewhat terrifying: make a contribution to an open source project and write about 500 words explaining what you did and how it felt.
Your target audience is anyone who uses open source software but doesn't know how to contribute.
This blog is one of the most important requirements of the first few weeks in the Whitaker lab. Our projects heavily use open source projects and contributing back to the open ecosystem is a core value of our group.
It is really scary to contribute to a project. Getting over this fear (or at least making the first steps to realising that it isn't as bad as you think!) is the largest barrier preventing most people from helping open source projects.
The fear is driven by not knowing what it means to contribute, so try to make sure your blog post covers these points:
- Why did you choose this project to contribute to?
- What contribution did you make?
- How did you find out information?
- How did it feel? What was the scariest part?
- What advice would you pass on to anyone who hasn't made their first contribution?
To upload your blog post, follow the instructions in the _posts/blog/template.md in the whitakerlab.github.io website repo.
The blog should be submitted as file in the _posts/blog directory via a pull request.