Course overview
Contributing to an open source project can be both very valuable and enjoyable to you, but as everything else in life it has a learning curve.
It would be really great to contribute one of the high-profile project, e.g. the Linux kernel, VS Code, or Android, just to name a few, but doing so will be difficult. Even if you are an expert in your field. (which might be programming, design, technical writing, etc.) The reason is that most likely these projects have already fixed all the simple bugs and added all the simple features.
Therefor during the course we take an approach that will start with relatively simple contributions and then we’ll slowly make them more and more difficult.
We start with data contribution that does not need any programming knowledge. We’ll use this opportunity to understand and practice pull-requests, forking, branching. We’ll also discuss Continuous Integration that we use to verify the format of the data we receive.
First you contribute a json file containing information about yourself to our shared project.
Then you will be asked to collect some data and contribute it in the form of a yaml file.
Then we’ll practice using git on the command line and learn writing Markdown to create a website for each participant.
TBD