Schneems • Open Source in your Inbox: Code Triage

“I don’t have time to contribute to open source”. But who does? We’re too busy shipping products and open source is so daunting and time consuming. Sure tools and technologies are our livelihood, but there’s just so much there. Even if you’ve got the time - where do you start?

What if giving back wasn’t so overwhelming, so time consuming, so vast and soul crushing? What if you could get bite-sized open source tasks delivered right to your inbox? You could work on them when you get some free time, while learning more about the underlying guts of the code you depend on. Well now you can with: Code Triage.

What is Code Triage?

Code triage sends you one issue a day from your favorite repos:

These issues come in one at a time and it could be anything: from a feature request, to a bug report, to code attached to a pull request. It’s up to you to figure out if you can fix, give feedback, or grab someone with more experience. The more you can help, the more free time the software maintainers have.

Do you want:

• To have your name in the commit log of famous projects?
• To gain a better understanding of the libraries you’re using?
• To use less buggy software?
• To be a better developer?
• To be a better person?

Then Code Triage is for you.

Maintainers: Increase your Firepower

You’ve got open source libraries? Add your repos to Code Triage and subscribe to them. I’ve a few of my own libraries: Wicked and Sextant to triage. On the rare ocasion when I have issues pile up, I make sure I can work them off at a sustainable pace.

If you know someone interested in your project, suggest that they sign up to triage the repo. Also consider putting a link on your README.

It has already worked well for me. When I first launched Code Triage into Beta, @neilmiddleton helped so much on issues that I gave him commit bit to the github repo. Now he works on the project and sometimes fixes issues before I even get a chance to take a look at them.

In fact it has worked out so well, Neil ended up asking me to co-author a Heroku book. Legal Disclaimer: Code Triage cannot guarantee you co-authorship of an O’Reilly book.

Programmers: Make a Difference

Open up your favorite editor, click “Recently Opened”, and then find a project. Take a good hard look at your dependencies, pick one, and then sign up to triage. It’s really that simple.

The era of “too busy”, “too novice”, and “too lost to start” are over. Now is the time to solve bugs, merge good pull requests, and prevent maintainer burn-out. Together we can do it.

Go make an impact: one issue at a time Code Triage.