Last week I ran an internal “So You Want to be an OpenStack Contributor?” workshop showing the different ways to work on OpenStack. Here’s the slide show so you can see the way I approached it. As the Documentation Program Technical Lead you’d think I’d steer people straight to the documentation bug backlog, but I try to find out where interests lie before going straight to doc fixes. Definitely people should read the docs as a great start.
You can work on OpenStack in non-code ways, such as bug triaging. Also the OpenStack Foundation does community marketing and staffs booths at events from the community. But a great way to understand the ins and outs of OpenStack-landia is to commit a patch.
I have to admit, I didn’t know much when I first started working on OpenStack at Rackspace. The Swift team was the group I had immediate access to in person. Wow were they patient with me while I made hilarious-in-hindsite errors. I had a patch where I changed “referer” one r to “referrer” two rs, because duh that’s how referrer is spelled. Well as it turns out that’s not the way the WC3 HTTP Protocol specifies request headers since 1992 or so, woops! Then I also managed to change the RST backticks (`) to single quotes (‘) which is absolutely not going to render correctly with Sphinx. Chuck Thier patiently explained the errors I had made and how to correct them. So do not be discouraged if it’s difficult to get the hang of your first patch or two or ten. Code reviewers are happy to help you iterate and revise. I’ve heard of good and bad patch reviewing going on in the community so I encourage you to find a real person who can help you get helpful reviews.
We also have organized OpenStack mentor programs now. We’ve been participating in the GNOME Outreach Program for Women for three rounds, and we’re a participating organization with the Google Summer of Code program for 2014. There are ideas for projects on the OpenStack wiki:
We have dedicated IRC channels for new contributors – #openstack-101 and #openstack-opw on freenode. Our OPW interns have written great blog entries about getting started with OpenStack (In a nutshell:how OpenStack works) and DevStack (Installing DevStack with Vagrant). Their fresh eyes make for great starting points. I encourage us all make this work both ways – people of OpenStack, be mentors, and newcomers, seek out the people in OpenStack who want to help you get started. Updated to add: be sure to check out opensource.com for “How to Contribute to OpenStack.”