I am a self taught, self hosting programmer, and thought I might try my hand at contributing to this project. I wanted to reach out to see what i need to know to help out, and if newbie contributors were welcome.
Hi, from the perspective of another user in a very similar position, I can tell you a few things:
Contributions are welcome, including from people who are maybe a bit less experience (I for example haven’t ever touched Go before making my first contribution to Vikunja). @kolaente is very diligent in reviewing pull requests, making sure the quality of the codebase stays up to a certain standard and honestly it also helps you as PR author to learn (a) how things are done in Vikunja and (b) about Go itself if you’re not super familiar with it.
Basically you can pick something you like to work on (either from the forum or maybe something you need for your implementation). My recommendation would be to open a a topic in the forums, describing what exactly you want to do including some idea how to do it. This one is both a good and bad example for that. Good, because it shows what I would recommend and bad, because I didn’t find the time to actually do what I promised there
Recommendations for first steps would be:
- Get access to the codebase (gitea), keep in mind that account activation is currently manual.
- Setup a development environment with minimal config, and compile Vikunja (both backend and frontend) from source to run it locally. Right now, there is no simply “how to get started” guide in the docs, once you find out all the first steps needed to start from scratch, that might be a very valuable first contribution
- There is developer documentation you can use for orientation.
Anyway, love to see others coming back and helping an amazing open source project!