4 ms·

CodeTriage: Help out your favorite open-source projects

73 points by tango24 8y ago

bprasanna 8y ago
It would have been great if they had search box or some sort of filter (like in DataTables js plugin).
- dapak 8y ago
  Agreed. I'd be more inclined to help if I could filter at a bit more of a granular level than just language. There are certain things that I "specialize" in that I feel could be of more merit to some projects than others.
ur-whale 8y ago
Will non-github open-source projects be able to participate?
officialchicken 8y ago
After trying to help a project on the triage site... there needs to be a troll or toxicity level indicating which github projects should be avoided for obvious reasons.
- fundamental 8y ago
  I would imagine that such a system would be hard to cultivate. For many projects I'd say that two people would be a very bad fit together due to a clash of personalities, but on their own there's nothing troll-ish or toxic about either individuals. It would be hard to really quantify such problems with a project rating score and since so few people would be using the rating system (for many project), then it would be possible for a incorrect outlook on a project to be given based upon a single misunderstanding with one individual.
  - mncharity 8y ago
    > I would imagine that such a system would be hard to cultivate. Yes, matchmaking/recommenders can be hard... but I wonder if there is a different cluster of low-hanging fruit here? Given a project on github, and desire to know its status, culture, players, etc, there's what I call the "github dance". Exploring commits and forks and pull requests and issues and wiki. Struggling to pull together a picture of n unfamiliar people from scattered comments. It's painful. It's very not what the github information display UI is optimized for. The exploratory dance seems far more often bounded by exhaustion than coverage confidence. There's almost no automation, for a task which seemingly permits a lot of it. So apropos GP and toxicity: Signals like lots of wontfix prs, or an ecology of unmerged forks, have to be gathered by eye. Rather than a more automated/clearly-presented "well, that's a bit odd...". Absent a standard way of presenting goals and scope and roadmap and culture, everyone is winging it, some inevitably more opaquely than others. One can figure out a lot about projects using github data, but it requires having surfed a lot of projects, and the gh ui is seriously fighting you. Heck, one of the times when you most want to explore the ecology of forks, large dissatisfied communities in need of a new nucleation point... does gh provide a nice tailored display? Ha - gh says 'too many forks to tell anything about them'. There seems a lot of untapped potential value. And at least some of it seems relatively unchallenging to implement. And then there's all the many extra nifty things one could do with rich bulk analysis and ML - shoemaker's children.
    - fundamental 8y ago
      That sounds like an interesting starting point for an academic paper on community interaction. Many of those metrics could be gamed if they were the 'goal' of a particular site, though before they're gamified they do sound like an interesting way of filtering through repos to find examples to talk about how communities function (or not).
- abathur 8y ago
  Toxicity might be hard, but some stats might end up being a fair proxy. Time to PR resolution, PR acceptance/rejection ratios. These probably get more useful as you break them down by the average profiles of who gets accepted and rejected (i.e., project has a high general acceptance rate, but no one with fewer than 5 PRs has ever had one accepted. Or, project hasn't accepted a PR from a previously-unaccepted user in over a year, etc. Maybe worthwhile to repeat the calculations but only track PRs submitted in response to a CodeTriage prompt.
fundamental 8y ago
I don't understand how a site like this really helps people find something that they're interested in, which has a good community, and is something that they would specifically want to be involved in. It just looks like data overload to me and it biases everything towards the ultra-large projects which for new contributors can be overwhelming (unless said project has a lot of effort in mentoring/on-boarding/etc). I'm not sure how you would present the information on this site in a way which would better lead to quality interactions between newcomers and existing projects, but as it stands it comes off to me as a jumbled list.
arandr0x 8y ago
It's somewhat more important to me (because I'm experienced) to find the right project vs a random issue in one of many projects... I don't have trouble thinking of open source projects to contribute to, but I work in a big co and not super interested in trying to edit something like firefox because the community is too large. I would prefer something like who's hiring but for volunteer work where projects say look, I have this kind of side project, or we have this smaller company, we use this stuff, we'd love to have a competent C++ person (sub your language of choice) to fix this (Windows build/annoying bug/move us to an awesomer version of a third party/rewrite the docs), in exchange, we're ready to have a short like 10mn 1:1 over IRC or email or something to help you get started. And then I'd feel like I can really bring something to the table, I suppose. Most projects say "come hang out in our channel" or "just start with one of the beginner issues"... but it's a little intimidating to go to a new channel and not know what to say and walk in on people being already friendly insiders just to get a task. And I never know if it's socially OK to pick an issue in the tracker and post and say I'll fix it... what if I hit a problem or it turns out to be more than I could chew at this point in time, etc.
- fundamental 8y ago
  It's tough. Supporting someone through their first contribution is a lot of work and there's a lot of falloff with new contributors. It's easier to say "just do the work yourself if you're actually interested" and it can be exhausting to go through the initial hand holding time and time again. As someone who is interested in growing a medium sized open source project, it's difficult to find the people who are interested in contributing without feeling too pushy. You want to give people the best information and tools to go forward, but you also want to let them learn independently (since scratching your itch is typically an adage within FOSS). I do push the "just pop into the IRC channel" approach because it's hard to give better recommendations before knowing who the other individual is and what they want to get out of volunteering. I don't know if any particular thread could accomplish the negotiation of "who want's to help whom" due to the vast differences of all the different specializations, project sizes, project collaboration styles, etc. It would be nice if it did though.
  - 8y ago
80386 8y ago
What I'm trying to do to get experience working on other people's code is get the people I know who are trying to build their portfolios to farm issues and so on out to each other. I know a guy who's working on an RSS feed reader and ran into a bug he doesn't feel like fixing, I have a Rails app that needs styling, we work on each other's projects. It's probably worse than finding big open-source projects to contribute to, but that's intimidating enough that none of us have done it.
abathur 8y ago
Not affiliated (nor previously familiar) with CodeTriage, but I see a number of "I wish it did X" responses already and thought it was worth pointing out that their About page links to the repo for CodeTriage itself: https://github.com/codetriage/codetriage https://github.com/codetriage/codetriage They have over 100 contributors, so it seems likely they'd appreciate your issue or pull request.

73 points by tango24 8y ago

bprasanna 8y ago

It would have been great if they had search box or some sort of filter (like in DataTables js plugin).

dapak 8y ago
Agreed. I'd be more inclined to help if I could filter at a bit more of a granular level than just language. There are certain things that I "specialize" in that I feel could be of more merit to some projects than others.

ur-whale 8y ago

Will non-github open-source projects be able to participate?

officialchicken 8y ago

After trying to help a project on the triage site... there needs to be a troll or toxicity level indicating which github projects should be avoided for obvious reasons.

fundamental 8y ago
I would imagine that such a system would be hard to cultivate. For many projects I'd say that two people would be a very bad fit together due to a clash of personalities, but on their own there's nothing troll-ish or toxic about either individuals. It would be hard to really quantify such problems with a project rating score and since so few people would be using the rating system (for many project), then it would be possible for a incorrect outlook on a project to be given based upon a single misunderstanding with one individual.
- mncharity 8y ago
  > I would imagine that such a system would be hard to cultivate. Yes, matchmaking/recommenders can be hard... but I wonder if there is a different cluster of low-hanging fruit here? Given a project on github, and desire to know its status, culture, players, etc, there's what I call the "github dance". Exploring commits and forks and pull requests and issues and wiki. Struggling to pull together a picture of n unfamiliar people from scattered comments. It's painful. It's very not what the github information display UI is optimized for. The exploratory dance seems far more often bounded by exhaustion than coverage confidence. There's almost no automation, for a task which seemingly permits a lot of it. So apropos GP and toxicity: Signals like lots of wontfix prs, or an ecology of unmerged forks, have to be gathered by eye. Rather than a more automated/clearly-presented "well, that's a bit odd...". Absent a standard way of presenting goals and scope and roadmap and culture, everyone is winging it, some inevitably more opaquely than others. One can figure out a lot about projects using github data, but it requires having surfed a lot of projects, and the gh ui is seriously fighting you. Heck, one of the times when you most want to explore the ecology of forks, large dissatisfied communities in need of a new nucleation point... does gh provide a nice tailored display? Ha - gh says 'too many forks to tell anything about them'. There seems a lot of untapped potential value. And at least some of it seems relatively unchallenging to implement. And then there's all the many extra nifty things one could do with rich bulk analysis and ML - shoemaker's children.
  - fundamental 8y ago
    That sounds like an interesting starting point for an academic paper on community interaction. Many of those metrics could be gamed if they were the 'goal' of a particular site, though before they're gamified they do sound like an interesting way of filtering through repos to find examples to talk about how communities function (or not).
abathur 8y ago
Toxicity might be hard, but some stats might end up being a fair proxy. Time to PR resolution, PR acceptance/rejection ratios. These probably get more useful as you break them down by the average profiles of who gets accepted and rejected (i.e., project has a high general acceptance rate, but no one with fewer than 5 PRs has ever had one accepted. Or, project hasn't accepted a PR from a previously-unaccepted user in over a year, etc. Maybe worthwhile to repeat the calculations but only track PRs submitted in response to a CodeTriage prompt.

fundamental 8y ago

I don't understand how a site like this really helps people find something that they're interested in, which has a good community, and is something that they would specifically want to be involved in. It just looks like data overload to me and it biases everything towards the ultra-large projects which for new contributors can be overwhelming (unless said project has a lot of effort in mentoring/on-boarding/etc). I'm not sure how you would present the information on this site in a way which would better lead to quality interactions between newcomers and existing projects, but as it stands it comes off to me as a jumbled list.

arandr0x 8y ago

It's somewhat more important to me (because I'm experienced) to find the right project vs a random issue in one of many projects... I don't have trouble thinking of open source projects to contribute to, but I work in a big co and not super interested in trying to edit something like firefox because the community is too large. I would prefer something like who's hiring but for volunteer work where projects say look, I have this kind of side project, or we have this smaller company, we use this stuff, we'd love to have a competent C++ person (sub your language of choice) to fix this (Windows build/annoying bug/move us to an awesomer version of a third party/rewrite the docs), in exchange, we're ready to have a short like 10mn 1:1 over IRC or email or something to help you get started. And then I'd feel like I can really bring something to the table, I suppose. Most projects say "come hang out in our channel" or "just start with one of the beginner issues"... but it's a little intimidating to go to a new channel and not know what to say and walk in on people being already friendly insiders just to get a task. And I never know if it's socially OK to pick an issue in the tracker and post and say I'll fix it... what if I hit a problem or it turns out to be more than I could chew at this point in time, etc.

fundamental 8y ago
It's tough. Supporting someone through their first contribution is a lot of work and there's a lot of falloff with new contributors. It's easier to say "just do the work yourself if you're actually interested" and it can be exhausting to go through the initial hand holding time and time again. As someone who is interested in growing a medium sized open source project, it's difficult to find the people who are interested in contributing without feeling too pushy. You want to give people the best information and tools to go forward, but you also want to let them learn independently (since scratching your itch is typically an adage within FOSS). I do push the "just pop into the IRC channel" approach because it's hard to give better recommendations before knowing who the other individual is and what they want to get out of volunteering. I don't know if any particular thread could accomplish the negotiation of "who want's to help whom" due to the vast differences of all the different specializations, project sizes, project collaboration styles, etc. It would be nice if it did though.
- 8y ago

80386 8y ago

What I'm trying to do to get experience working on other people's code is get the people I know who are trying to build their portfolios to farm issues and so on out to each other. I know a guy who's working on an RSS feed reader and ran into a bug he doesn't feel like fixing, I have a Rails app that needs styling, we work on each other's projects. It's probably worse than finding big open-source projects to contribute to, but that's intimidating enough that none of us have done it.

abathur 8y ago

Not affiliated (nor previously familiar) with CodeTriage, but I see a number of "I wish it did X" responses already and thought it was worth pointing out that their About page links to the repo for CodeTriage itself: https://github.com/codetriage/codetriage https://github.com/codetriage/codetriage They have over 100 contributors, so it seems likely they'd appreciate your issue or pull request.