This is prompted by James Bennet's article yesterday <https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2018/nov/20/core/> which prompted a discussion with a coworker of mine.
I've been using django for a while now, am a mid-level at a company that uses django/DRF heavily, and am a regular lurker here because its a great way to keep up with the happenings of the project. That said, this is from an outsiders perspective: 1. The documentation of the framework is top notch, but the sections on contributing and getting up to speed with the framework, how to run it while developing on it, etc are sparse. The codebase is fairly intimidating when you read a ticket and then try to dig in. Fortunately, all breakage from my experimentation is private and not public :-). I feel having a much more thorough documentation/examples of ramping up and getting started would do a great job in reducing some of that intimidation factor. 2. The fellows, Tim and Carlton, do a great job here in triaging tickets and handling the day to day work of the project. But I feel the bug tracker is being a significant hindrance to contributors and possible contributors, and when combined with a lack of intuitive methods to find easy picking tickets makes it more difficult to get going from scratch. I imagine this is something that has been discussed before. 3. I like the idea James proposed about mergers and releasers. I would also suggest that mergers be people who have significant experience in specific parts of Django and handle merging of those tickets. This is similar to how the Linux kernel project is set up, with maintainers responsible for specific segments of the code tree. It would also be great if these mergers had technical team-lead like skills that can be used to shepherd both new and knowledgeable contributors onward and upward with tickets, knowledge and support. I personally am going to make more of an effort to get more involved here, but I think these three points above would help lower the mental resistance of someone that wants to enter the project. I have to wonder, however, how well situated the experienced people here are for spending time getting new contributors up to speed. Onboarding a new developer is a major time allocation at companies, much less open source projects that are being worked on in ocassional company time/spare time across the world. What's the capacity available, and who is available for what kind of questions? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/django-developers. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/6a80dbf4-dcc5-40dc-bca8-11cdcc6e7ab8%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
