๐ Hello fellow devs!
For my 3rd Hacktoberfest challenge, I finally decided to participate mainly as a maintainer and I would like to share and discuss with you the benefits (and difficulties! ๐ฌ) of it!
๐ My background
Coding and contributing to projects are only side activities for me. Still, I always loved the spirit behind open source projects and I wanted to be part of it!
๐ฏ Goals
I used to participate in the Hacktoberfest challenge as a contributor as it was for me a great opportunity to gain experience and to understand how things worked.
But I am also a maintainer of the aliceandbob.io project on Github.
It was then a good opportunity for me to change my approach: I decided that I would open issues on this project for contributors to work on. โจ
I wanted to offer some really easy-to-resolve issues, more to understand how to contribute rather than actually coding - in short, everything that I wanted to find when I was a first-time contributor to the hacktoberfest! - which was for me a good way to start smoothly as a maintainer.
aliceandbob-io
/
aliceandbob
๐ A free, light and easy to use client-side tool to generate PGP key pairs, encrypt and decrypt messages.
aliceandbob.io ๐๐
A free, light and easy to use client-side tool to generate PGP key pairs, encrypt and decrypt messages.
Check it out! ๐ฅ
Features โจ
- ๐๏ธ Generate PGP key pairs
- ๐ Encrypt messages with the public PGP key of the receiver
- ๐ Decrypt messages with your private PGP key
Tech ๐ง
- HTML/CSS
- Ruby (v2.6.5)
- Rails (v6.0.3.2)
- Stimulus JS (v1.1.1)
Library ๐
OpenPGP.js (v5.3.0), a JavaScript implementation of the OpenPGP protocol. Find out more on openpgpjs.org.
Contributing ๐ฐ
Please contribute using GitHub Flow. Refer first to the open issues then create a branch, add commits, and open a pull request!
You can also read the CODE OF CONDUCT.
When forking and cloning the repo, don't forget to do the following:
yarn install --check-filesbundle install- Duplicate the
database.yml.templatefile and rename itdatabase.yml - Update the
database.ymlfile as needed to match your configuration - Then,
rails db:setup.
๐ง The journey
I started by opening begginer-friendly issues such as this one:
docs: update of the landing page
#39
The screenshot that appears in the /app/views/pages/_section_webapp.html.erb page needs to be replaced.
The new screenshot may be found here and is named screenshot-online-pgp-tool_v2.png.
By doing so I was able to follow the work of potential contributors, to answer them and to guide them if needed. It was also the opportunity for me to understand the role of a maintainer and a reviewer, to assign properly issues and to make sure that contributors would follow the guide of conduct and the Git and Github concepts.
So far so good I must say! I am learning a lot as a maintainer, which is not always as easy as I would have thought! ๐
๐ฅ Next steps!
My Hacktoberfest 2021 experience as a first-time maintainer is really exciting and I will definitly participate next year as I am learning a lot.
But now, I would like to be able to open several and complicated issues at the same time, dealing with multiple pull requests and struggling with merge conflicts ๐คฏ In short, going a step further in open-sourcing the project!
I was then wondering what was your experience of it, both as maintainer and as contributor. What makes a good maintainer? What are the biggest issues you are dealing with? Are you sometimes overwhelmed with inputs from contributors? etc.
I would love to read from you all! ๐
Thanks a lot for reading and for your comments!
Happy Hacktoberfest to all of you! ๐
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