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I like the idea a lot. I've been thinking about something similar: An explanation/notes "wiki" for exemplary open source repository snapshots. With the goal to

I like the idea a lot. I've been thinking about something similar: An explanation/notes "wiki" for exemplary open source repository snapshots. With the goal to document everything you can see in a repo so beginners can understand and catch up with structure, conventions and understand algorithms and common problems IRL. Imperfections and errors are part of the game and need to be explained as well, and because of that infrequent snapshots are sufficient. Something to overcome tutorial hell and lower the threshold for participation in FOSS projects.

didizaja 6y ago
Wow, that sounds extremely useful! I haven't contributed to any FOSS projects in a meaningful way (yet), but I imagine that lots of potential contributors spend an inordinate amount of time trying to familiarize themselves with structure, conventions, and how everything fits together. Having all of that information in one, well-documented place could definitely help with getting up to speed/creating a mental model for the project faster. On a semi-related front, I'm also interested in lowering the threshold for participation in FOSS projects, but I approached things from the lens of helping potential contributors better grok/intuit the social/organizational structure of a project. To that end, I made small badges that projects can add to their READMEs to indicate, to a rough approximation, what "type" of project they are[0]. The project types are described in a really interesting book called Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software[1] by Nadia Eghbal. [0]: https://project-types.github.io/ https://project-types.github.io/ [1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578675862/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578675862/