If you are an experienced Impala contributor, and you'd like to help with community outreach, you can post a walkthrough of a ticket that a newbie will be able to address in only an hour of your time.
Get started by looking through open tickets labelled "newbie" https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?filter=12341668 Look for a ticket with a few characteristics: 1. It looks like a new contributor could honestly handle this ticket! Sometimes the "newbie" label is applied overzealously. 2. It looks like a ticket you could write a quick-and-ugly patch for very quickly. Nobody will have to ever see it but you! 3. It's not essential to the next release - we wouldn't want an experienced contributor taking on an issue out of urgency and snatching it away from a new contributor. 4. It's not so out-of-date that it no longer describes the system as it currently exists. 5. It hasn't been commented on with a walkthrough already. If you can't find a ticket like this that is labelled "newbie", look for newer open tickets with priority "Major" or below. The last community effort to go through open tickets and label some "newbie" may have been months before you are looking, so there may be good tickets for new contributors that just haven't been labelled "newbie" yet. Once you find a ticket you like, get a document ready to take notes in, and start hacking up a patch, just for yourself, to make sure you know what direction to point newbies in. Your notes document does not need to include any of the code you write, only hints and signposts. You don't need your code or prose to be perfect. Writing a quick-and-dirty patch and doing your writeup of how you did it should take an hour or less. It's OK to remind new contributors that they can choose to only partially fix an issue, as long as the state of the code is still coherent and lends itself to being fixed more, later. Once you're done, prepend to your writeup a note about how to get started. I use the following text, but feel free to improvise: "If you'd like to contribute a patch to Impala, but aren't sure what you want to work on, you can look at Impala's newbie issues: https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?filter=12341668. You can find detailed instructions on submitting patches at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/IMPALA/Contributing+to+Impala. This is a walkthrough of a ticket a new contributor could take on, with hopefully enough detail to get you going but not so much to take away the fun." Append to your writeup a note of encouragement, like "Have fun, and you can ask d...@impala.apache.org for help if you need a hint!" Now post your writeup to d...@impala.apache.org. You can email me when you're done and I will post it two more places: 1. I'll wait a few minutes to see your writeup on https://lists.apache.org/list.html?d...@impala.apache.org. I'll click the message title, then click "Permalink", then copy the URL and post that to the ticket. 2. I'll post to https://helpwanted.apache.org. Here's an example of what it will look like: https://helpwanted.apache.org/task.html?b1b131fffb24afb17f52f7aae67beb73034832a7 If you're feeling energetic, feel free to do this cross-posting yourself. Have fun, and don't hesitate to email me with any questions!
