As the title suggests, I’d like to apply to become a maintainer of the Swift-Track, as the GitHub Actions bot also suggested here and I believe I’m well-suited to support its ongoing maintenance, especially since the Swift repo currently lacks dedicated maintainers.
Why me?
I’ve been an active mentor on this track for several(6-7) years now.
I’ve contributed to the track before, like this one.
I’m actively contributing on many open-source swift repos, including well-known ones like swift-build, firebase, vapor, TCA, etc.)
I have achieved Supermentor and Lifetime Insider badges.
I can say that I am the Swift maintainer and have been a maintainer for a while, the message I think you are referring to to means that there are no (plural) maintainers. Personally, I have been thinking of leaving maintainership of the Swift track since 2024 (and I had a plan as such). This was mostly since I wanted to work on other tracks, you can read about it here: An Update and Crystal Operation Citrine - Exercism - Exercism. What to note about that statement is that I have fixed the test-runner so it isn’t messy anymore. However, Swift-testing got released, which I thought was cool, and I thought it was a bit cruel to leave the track with XCTest and let them have to carry out the update.
I do not question your expertise with Swift. However, I think it would be good to do a bit more contributing (code) to a track (even if mentoring is appreciated, it is quite different). But this is also so you get a bit of a feeling of what maintaining is about (on Exercism). It would also help you get familiar with the Exercim tools. There is, of course, the part of people opening prs/issues but I would personally say that is quite a small part of it.
So, to make a clear path for you, my idea here is that you do the following:
Add 5 new practice exercises to the track of your own choice (from problem spec). If the exercise has a canonical-data.json, you should write a template for the exercises test file so the creation of the test file can be automatic. At least two exercises should feature a canonical-data.json.
Sync the exercises, I last did this around six months ago, so it should be a bit to sync.
Add one concept and exercise, or two approaches, or two mentor notes (you could also mix one approach with one mentor note).
I suggest you do it in the order I provided above (but you don’t have to). I also suggest you read some of the exercism docs before you start, and also look at how other exercises have been implemented. This path I have put forward is there no time frame, so do it at your own pace (could be 3 months, could be a week, could be a year).
If you have any questions (during the process) so am I (and likely other maintainers) am happy to answer any of your questions. I have an exam tomorrow, so I will likely review the pr you have opened earlier today, but then if you open any more, will you have to wait to Thursday evening/friday.
Thanks a lot for the detailed response @Meatball and for outlining a clear path forward, I really appreciate the time you took, especially with your exam coming up. Good luck with that, by the way!
There’s no need for deep research to see your priceless effort on the Swift track, it really shows! I was referring to the message from the GitHub Actions bot that says:
This repo does not currently have dedicated maintainers.
I had been planning to review all exercises one by one, not just from the learner’s perspective (code, tests, instructions), but also from behind the scenes, including files like canonical-data.json, and so on. That said, the roadmap you suggested makes perfect sense and I’ll definitely start working through it.
!