Greetings everyone!
DigitalOcean is sponsoring Hacktoberfest again this year. For those unfamiliar, it is a global event which incentivizes contributions to open source projects during October.
The software and infrastructure running Lobste.rs open source, and we have several open issues which would be perfect for new contributors. If anyone wants to participate in the event and would like to contribute to Lobste.rs; feel free to ask either me (c35e3b) or pushcx in our community channel for assistance.
In addition to the prize put up by DigitalOcean for contributing, we can also offer you a Lobste.rs cloak on Freenode.
Coincidentally, this is one year to the day of the last big call for contributors. Thanks again to everyone who’s reported an issue, helped solve a bug, or written code for Lobsters. I said a little while ago I’d send stickers to everyone I’ve merged a contribution for. I haven’t sent those out yet, but this is a good excuse to get moving on it. I’ve scheduled a couple hours on Saturday, Nov 2nd for envelope stuffing.
And don’t feel limited to the “good first issue” tag - that’s there to highlight the issues that require little understanding of the Lobsters community or are more approachable for junior devs; we’d appreciate help with any issue. There’s also the lobsters-ansible repo for our hosting setup. I’d especially appreciate help with mariadb deadlocks because getting a 500 is especially lousy when someone’s trying to contribute.
The CONTRIBUTING.md has some setup instructions. If you have any hassle, please let me know, I want it to be very easy to get started with the codebase or start a sister site.
I’ve replied to a few issues that I think could do with clarification (under my deadnamed account because it needs some activity for CV reasons, ha :P), I’m tentative about responding or working on the ‘good first issues’ tag though because I don’t want to sweep out all of the low-hanging fruit, especially if it would stop someone else engaging with the GH.
I promise you we cannot run out of ‘good first issue’ issues. Some of these unblock other features not yet in the tracker to cut down on clutter, and I have a bunch enough low-hanging/low-priority fruit in my notes to make the issue tracker into a cornucopia.
Please, someone add pagination to “Your Threads” page so you can see all your old comments. You can only see the most recent 20 right now.
Is there a bug you can link me to?
Yep, it’s here. You can solve it for that one page or (optional hard mode) help clean up the inconsistent pagination across the site.
It’s annoying that only contributions to projects on Microsoft’s platform count…
@andyc Will Oilshell be participating?
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+hacktoberfest
Sorry didn’t see this earlier. It looks like any issue counts, and I maintain the “good first issue” and “help wanted” labels regularly:
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22help+wanted%22
If anything piques your interest, feel free to DM me here or chat with me on https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/ .
Some of the “good first issue” require some expertise, but not all. Oil is a plain Python program, with a small number of plain C extensions, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get started. On Linux machines you should be able to make a dev build in 1 to 3 minutes (e.g. after installing Python headers, etc.)
edit: I labeled the 2 smallest but still impactful issues with hacktoberfest
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Ahacktoberfest
Hacktoberfest is great. I once accidentally got a T-Shirt because of a bad PR that got abandoned and rewritten into a good PR. :P (Of course I had signed up, but of course you can game the system, even accidentally)