Community contrib direction

[therebelrobot]

Hey guys!

So I saw the TC meeting with the goal of Jan 13th for the alpha release, and am super excited to be seeing movement with this! I was wondering what I could do, as a member of the community, to help assist with hitting that goal?

I'm a full-time node dev, with no experience in C nor C++, but could possibly help with documentation or something along those lines? With this fork officially occurring, I want to do everything in my power to make sure it takes off like it should. Fishrock123, Domenic and chrisdickinson on #io.js and #node-forward irc channels directed me to nodebug.me for triaging issues on node core, but also to open an issue here to see from you guys what can be done to assist.

Thanks for all you're doing!
Trent

EDIT: Updated in light of #28

[alexgorbatchev]

I'd like to throw my hat in as well

[chrisdickinson]

Thanks for your interest & offer to help! Are there any particular subsystems you're interested in working on, or working towards? Subsystems are, roughly:

• the core modules in lib/ (like fs.js, stream.js, etc) -- all JS.
• src, which contains the C++ bindings, which are themselves subdivided into different concerns.
• doc
• bench, which contains the benchmarking tools
• build

A good place to start is to pick a subsystem and go look for bugs in the joyent/node issue tracker; tackling smaller things along the way. If you get overwhelmed by the tracker (which is the natural human reaction to 800 open issues), or if you'd like any direction on bigger features/bugs to tackle, feel free to ping me here, or in IRC (chrisdickinson in #io.js on freenode). I'd be extremely happy to help find something to work on and shepherd your commits through the PR/review/merge process.

Thanks again!

[therebelrobot]

Thanks @chrisdickinson ! I've PR'd a little work on the iojs.github.io page, and most of my experience is in front-end and basic express work, so doc may be the best bet for me. I will definitely take a look at the issues and see what I can find.

Side note: are you ok with me adding your response to the FAQ in PR? I tried to add what little I know but it's far from authoritative.

EDIT: moved link

[chrisdickinson]

I'd be okay with that. Something that might be worth looking into in the docs realm is how we get the api docs onto that iojs.github.io page + styles for those docs.

[chrisdickinson]

Closing this now – if you have any questions please feel free to ping me in IRC in #io.js on freenode.

[therebelrobot]

Not to worry. I'm on the website team now, so i'll be contributing through there. :)