Apologies for missing the Hangout; Eastern time (UTC-5:00) was work time for me and couldn't participate.
Been reading Making Your Open Source Project Newcomer-friendly <https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/01/03/making-your-open-source-project-newcomer-friendly/#fnref:3> and one of the items made me pause. They reference https://gitter.im/ as an option of real time chat. I've found great value working on open source projects using IRC, Slack, and Gitter. Since Gitter is free and requires nothing more then a GitHub account to participate it is an excellent option for chatting about a project. I think this would be especially useful for pair programming on issues. I imagine a scenario were an issue is presented and someone wants to look at it so they work out a schedule and jump into Gitter to chat about it and possibly start a pairing session. Currently the only blocker is you have to be the owner/collaborator of the TiddlyWiki repo in order to start the TiddlyWiki chat. Once complete the link could be added to the HelloThere tiddler. <http://tiddlywiki.com/#HelloThere> Also I think there are three key points to helping contributions. 1. Automated Testing - Has a very-high implementation cost but would be worth working on even if down a little at a time. (long term milestone?) 2. Well structured contributing guidelines - I think expanding the http://tiddlywiki.com/dev/ edition to include instruction on contribution, basic Pull Request workflows, Git basics, and commit/branch guidelines would be a huge win. 3. Mentoring - I think it would help if seasoned contributors would be willing to jump on new comers' Pull Requests and Issues and help them to start a Pull Request, Rebase a Pull Request, guidance on coding (maybe with a live session on https://jsbin.com or https://jsfiddle.net), guidance on good Git etiquette, etc. Again a chat channel like Gitter would make this process more approachable for everyone. >From personal experience I can say that there are a few sticky points I had when starting to contribute to TiddlyWiki. At first the architecture/code base was foreign to me. I didn't know where to start looking. Most of the docs on the Widgets, Plugins, etc. were lacking detail and I had to fall into reading lots of the code to understand what I could do or not do. And how to workaround a lot of the assumptions put in place. For example the whole mixing the concepts of a DOM tree and a Widget (under the hood they are essentially the same thing) or the lack of conceptual separation between the Node.JS environment and the Browser environment (same code runs on both; guarded by $tw.browser / $tw.node checks) or when to add a feature via crafted tiddlers versus JavaScript plugins. The other hurtle I had in general when contributing to any open source project was coping with criticism and feedback with Pull Requests. This was difficult because of how the process of Pull Requests are in general. It took me quite some time to be comfortable with putting a ton of work on something, packaging it up, and sending it to be reviewed only to find all the things I did wrong and should have done differently. Normally this is constructive criticism but there is that frustration and disheartening that happens. A better mental model would be to have an organic conversation where the thought process and work could be discussed as it being worked on. GitHub doesn't do much for facilitating that organic communication which is why I postulate most new comers are more comfortable submitting an Issue rather then working on code changes for a Pull Request. It needs a level of confidence for the later to make it over the mental hump. I'm not sure if the Patch Workflow <http://rypress.com/tutorials/git/patch-workflows> changes any of that or if live conversations (chats) would change things. Perhaps this point is an invitation for discussion. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/d5396779-679d-48eb-9682-629c1f03cf96%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
