Hello, everyone! I am wondering how I can contribute to open-source projects. I went through the contribution guides on exercism.org. But I still couldn’t find a start.
Can someone give me guidelines or any advice.
Thanks
How would you like to contribute? What language(s)? Have you considered mentoring? Many tracks could use help implementing exercises from the problem specs and/or writing Approaches docs. Most tracks expect you to discuss changes with the track maintainers on this forum prior to working on changes.
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I have been actively mentoring for JavaScript, python and typescript since I only know those languages.
I would like to create new exercises or test cases on those tracks.
I didn’t know abt writing Approaches docs, can you refer me to some?
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Totally new exercise need some serious time investment and go through deliberation before it got accepted, because it needs to be something that differ than the ones we already got, and ideally it should be implementable for as many tracks as possible.
Test cases for existing exercises are welcome if they offer something new to cover a possible edge case, or some possible flaw that got overlooked.
As for writing approaches, they existed on the website in the dig deeper tab, you can read them to get a feel of what going on.
you can also check out a pr that got submitted here to see how it should work
But before all, you should read through the docs to get a general understanding of how a track structure work, and then make a fork of it to work locally.
And the most important thing is communicate with track maintainer about your intention for approval before opening PR on github.
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As a general rule we’re not looking to add new tests to existing exercises. More isn’t always better. We do add tests when a gap is uncovered but those are generally the result of an incorrect student solution. Please don’t go actively searching for tests to add; that’s generally not a good use of time.
As @glaxxie mentioned, new practice exercises are great if there is something novel that can be added to the problem specs. Here’s some prior “New Exercise” threads for flavor:
- New Exercise Proposal: Kanoodle
- New Exercise Proposal: Tower of Hanoi
- New exercise: Ordinal numbers
- New exercise about bitwise operations
- Add new practice exercises
New concept exercises are tied to concepts in a track syllabus and are hugely valuable but should be coordinated with the track maintainer(s).
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