[yt-dev] Fwd: [astropy-dev] A word on GSoC and new contributors

[Matthew Turk]

I thought this email from Erik Bray was thoughtful and well-written, and
might be of interest to folks here.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Bray <erik.m.bray at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 1:01 PM
Subject: [astropy-dev] A word on GSoC and new contributors
To: astropy-dev at googlegroups.com


Hi all,

Just a few thoughts jumbling around in my head lately that I need to
get out--this is me speaking for myself.  This in particular should be
read by anyone interesting in applying for a Google Summer of Code
internship with the Astropy project (under the assumption that Astropy
will participate this year, and will receive funding from Google under
the program).

But even if you're not looking to participate in GSoC, there's a point
I want novices interested in contributing to understand:  That's great
that you're excited to contribute to open source.  We welcome and
deeply appreciate contributions from all comers. [just see the number
of open issues Astropy has on GitHub]. We should (and as far as I've
seen do) strive to guide and work with each other to move Astropy
forward whether you're a student or professional astronomer, or of any
other background, and regardless of your experience contributing to
open source projects like Astropy. This is in accordance with
Astropy's Code of Conduct [1].

This involves mutual respect between newcomers, and long-time
contributors.  This means that new contributors must also respect the
time and availability of existing contributors.  To this end, it is
the responsibility of new contributors to discover on their own the
contribution directions [2], and show some self-direction on their
part.  Because unless otherwise stated (such as at a code sprint),
nobody has explicitly volunteered, at this stage, to be anyone else's
personal mentor.  We will always provide respectful feedback and
advice on your contributions.  And if you have *specific* ideas on
what kinds of issues you would like to work on we'll also provide
feedback on that.  But otherwise it is helpful to show initiative.

Finally a few additional tips: Aside from the introduction for
contributors linked to in [2], another useful resource that might be
easy to miss is the contributing guidelines [3], useful for anyone
ready to work on a specific issue.  Most people seem to do a good job
following that so it isn't a problem--just always worth pointing out.
Make sure also not to miss the "development workflow" guide linked to
from the contributing guidelines.  There *are* some things in there
that new contributors often miss, such as advice to not make a pull
request from your "master" branch (always start a new branch for new
work).

Also, if you have any general questions about contributing, please ask
here, on this mailing list, or via one of the other communication
channels listed in [2].  Please do not, if you can help it, ask
general questions in GitHub issues--unless the question or comment is
specifically related to that issue it is noise that can make issues
hard to follow.

Thanks for reading, and keep up the good work,
Erik


[1] http://www.astropy.org/about.html#codeofconduct
[2] http://www.astropy.org/contribute.html
[3] https://github.com/astropy/astropy/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"astropy-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to astropy-dev+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-dev-spacepope.org/attachments/20160125/c407cf33/attachment.htm>