Each project has issues labeled "First Timers Only," try working on one of those for your first pull request.
Below there are tutorials and cheat sheets from Git to Glitch to Markdown. As well as information on how to help, even if you're not a developer. Ask your questions on Slack, either on the #questions channel or in the project's channel (ex. #portal for the portal repo).
- Here’s a 15 minute tutorial from GitHub to learn Git or use this awesome tutorial.
- After you’ve got a basic understanding of Git, work through some Github Tutorials.
- Glitch gives you a way to start coding without having to set up a development environment. Just sign up, click create a new website, and choose import from Github from the advanced options. Then you can start coding!
- Documentation on GitHub is written in markdown. It’s used in comments for pull requests and issues, gists, and many files. Here’s a great tutorial and here’s a quick cheat sheet.
We need your help too! Look for these labels in the Issues:
- Documentation: Documentation is a huge part of a successful open source project. Organizations need documentation to help attract users and new contributors.
- Research: An organization may need help crunching numbers or analyzing feedback to better understand what the users want or need.
- Outreach Outreach is how open source projects attract new users and developers. This includes writing blog posts or making videos, organizing meetups, or helping others learn about the project.
- Training: Teach others how to use the project. This is a specialized form of outreach or documentation.
- User Interface: User interface can include many types of tasks including designing new visual aspects of a webpage or creating a new logo for the project. It may also include various accessibility opportunities to help make the project easier for people who are visually impaired.
- Quality Assurance: Finding and verifying bugs is an important part of software development.
- Other: If you have an idea that may help an organization, reach out to them and let them know! Sometimes the best task is one that the organization hasn’t even considered yet.
