I got into contributing to Julia because of @timholy's amazing #9493. It
was pretty easy to figure out, based on that issue, what I was supposed to
do and how to contribute. But what if someone just doesn't want to write
tests (maybe they have test anxiety) or doesn't have domain knowledge for
linear algebra/strings/parallel computing?
There are often issues opened that don't require an in-depth knowledge of
Julia to fix (like "make this error message clearer"), or things people
have been putting off because there's a lot to do (rewriting the linalg
code to make it easier to read and look at exception branching). Lots of
other big open source projects have a tag in the issue tracker for
newbie/first-timer friendly things to tackle. Code cleanup is a good
example, or "write some simple tests to make sure all the exception
branches are covered", with a checklist of files that need work.
It would be nice if there were multiple "points of entry" to Julia
contributions besides writing docs, full features, or tests, because the
docs are super good and tests/features can either require domain knowledge
or some familiarity with Julia internals.
One could also make an "easy" tag, for features that are relatively
straightforward to implement but people just haven't yet, e.g.
`Symmetric{SparseMatrixCSC}` doesn't have `full` defined yet but that would
be really easy for a first/second time contribution.
