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Contributing: Samson Goddy on Sugar Labs

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Samson Goddy, co-founder of Open Source Community Africa, and one of the maintainers for the Sugar Labs project.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

OSCA is a project I started with a friend and a couple of other people to encourage folks to contribute to open source. Sugar Labs is a software project that helps kids to learn how to code, a mathematics and science learning environment, on Linux.

What can you tell us about your project?
Sugar Labs is a huge project, it started from a popular project called One Laptop per Child. The idea was to give developing countries a way to use computers in a more creative way in classrooms. It targets from 8 years old up to 18 years old. I got a computer when I was 8, so I grew up in the ecosystem, and then became a core maintainer for the project. We still believe in the vision of enabling kids that love science and technology to have an an environment that encourages their creativity - one good example is musicblocks, teaching the concepts of both music and programming at the same time. You can think of Sugar Labs as a sort of an App Store, a collection of activities.

What contributions are you welcoming?
We're looking for any type of contribution! The project is 100% open and free. We're particularly looking for people with knowledge of Python and JavaScript - the Sugar Labs ecosystem is divided into 2 parts, the web part is written in JavaScript, the desktop side of things heavily depends on Python. Specifically things like PyGtk, which is the Gnome Toolkit. We also have some PHP on our App Store.

If you can code, if you can code, do technical writing, we very much welcome your contributions!

How do folks get started?
I'd highly recommend you to go to our Docs for more information about the project, on what to contribute to and how, and when you can't find the answer you're looking for there's also a way to contact the community. We look forward to your contributions!

Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.

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