It’s Hacktoberfest time! Have you considered contributing to the CHAOSS software tool GrimoireLab? This post summarizes how to get started as well as some open source contribution guidelines which any newbie should keep an eye on!
What is Hacktoberfest?
Hacktoberfest is a celebration! More accurately, a month-long celebration of open source software. This time, it is run by DigitalOcean in partnership with Intel and Dev.
From senior developers to students learning to code; open source enthusiasts of all skill levels can participate. Rules are simple: create a minimum of 4 quality Pull Requests on GitHub to any open source project repo during the whole month of October and get those Pull Requests accepted.
By completing this challenge, you will earn your Hacktoberfest tee or tree reward. Just make sure to register first!
Why contributing to Grimoirelab?
Whether you are a first time contributor or an advanced player in the open source game, the GrimoireLab project is a good option to help drive growth of open source and make positive contributions to the community.
It is a technology used by well-known organizations and other projects: such as The Linux Foundation Community Bridge Insights, Mautic Community, Cauldron, or Bitergia Analytics.
It is suitable for Data Scientists, Python, and JavaScript developers: GrimoireLab is a Software Development Analytics toolkit for:
💻 Automatic and incremental data gathering from almost any tool (data source) related to contributing to Open Source development (e.g., source code management, issue tracking systems, forums)
🔍 Automatically gathered data enrichment such as merging duplicate identities, adding additional information about contributors affiliation, calculation delays, or geographical data.
📊 Data consumption and visualization includes allowing filtering by time range, project, repository, and contributor.
It has a consolidated and active community: GrimoireLab has been part of the Software Technical committee of The Linux Foundation CHAOSS project since 2017.
How to get started?
There are two important aspects you should consider: How to make open source contributions (if this is your first time) and how to contribute to GrimoireLab.
How to make your first contribution to open source
If you’re new to open source you might be struggling to understand how forking and cloning repos, branches, and commit rules work. Don’t worry, that’s something EVERYONE has faced at some point and there is no need to be afraid of.
To make things easier for you, take a look at the Introduction to Open Source tutorial series that folks at Digital Ocean have prepared.
Also, you can follow this video tutorial which explains how to create your first PR (Pull Request) step by step:
Once you get familiar with how open source contributions work, it’s time to move to how to make your first GrimoireLab contribution during Hacktoberfest!
How to contribute to GrimoireLab
As any other open source projects, GrimoireLab works with forks and Pull Requests. You can get started by reading the CONTRIBUTING.md file available at GrimoireLab’s GitHub repository.
Process to contribute is pretty straightforward and it is available at GrimoireLab website:
💚 Step1: Visit Hacktoberfest website and sign in with your GitHub account
💚 Step 2: Choose your favorite GrimoireLab issue and submit your pull Request. This year, merged or accepted Pull Requests count if:
- The PR is labelled as
hacktoberfest-acceptedby a maintainer OR
- The PR is submitted in a repo with the
hacktoberfesttopic
💚 Step 3: Wait for your PR to be reviewed and merged
Important things to know
Commit signature is required
The CHAOSS Charter requires that contributions are accompanied by a Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off. For ensuring it, a bot checks all incoming commits.
You can sign your commit using the command:
$ git commit -sCommit messages need to follow some guidelines
If you browse the log of any random Git repository, you will probably find its commit messages are more or less a mess. Thus, it is required to follow some rules when creating the message when submitting your PR.
The quickest way to summarize this is:
- Separate subject from body with a blank line
- Limit the subject line to 50 characters
- Capitalize the subject line
- Do not end the subject line with a period
- Use the imperative mood in the subject line
- Wrap the body at 72 characters
- Use the body to explain what and why vs. how
All these steps are explained in this post about How to Write a Git Commit Message.
Bonus point: The power of Grimoirelab Community
One of the things I love about the GrimoireLab community is how welcoming and inclusive they are when newbies create their first contributions to the project, so don’t be afraid of missing something or getting stuck, the community is always there to help!
GrimoireLab uses a mailing list, IRC, and Issues as the main communication channels. However, if you are more comfortable speaking with specific contributors, here is a list of people you can get in contact with Santiago Dueñas or Venu Varhan.
The GrimoireLab team hopes to see you soon
Best of luck Developers… and Wizards! 👩💻👨💻🧙♀️🧙♂️
