{"id":42539,"date":"2020-10-27T16:00:16","date_gmt":"2020-10-27T15:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-gb\/industry\/blog\/?p=42539"},"modified":"2020-11-13T13:07:04","modified_gmt":"2020-11-13T12:07:04","slug":"starting-my-first-open-source-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-gb\/industry\/blog\/technetuk\/2020\/10\/27\/starting-my-first-open-source-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Starting my first Open Source project"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"An<\/p>\n

Getting started with open source can be daunting. When people think about open source projects, they often think of huge projects like TensorFlow<\/a> or smaller libraries such as the awesome Alexa.NET SDK, and that they are run and contributed to by veteran open source experts.<\/p>\n

Well, I don\u2019t count myself as a veteran open source expert but I want to share with you some success I’ve had starting my first open source project.<\/p>\n

Inspired by the awesome WebDevchecklist.com<\/a>, I had the idea of creating a website with a checklist to help with code reviews called CodeReviewChecklist.com<\/a>. It isn\u2019t necessarily meant to be a definitive checklist, more a prompt\/reminder of things to look for. The list of checks is one of the things needing some additional work!<\/p>\n

This time, however, unlike my previous websites\/side projects, I decided to try and get help from the development community and allow them to make changes themselves by making it open source. After all, this is a tool meant for use by the development community, so it made sense to open it up to contributions from them.<\/p>\n

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Initial Contributors<\/h2>\n

Following a short lull after creating the project, I started to get approached by people wishing to help out. The first issues included things like creating a toggleable dark theme and ensuring the site is responsive, which were immediate improvements.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the initial people that reached out to me asking whether they could help with CodeReviewChecklist.com heard about the project whilst I was giving a talk on a completely different subject (Augmented Reality on iPhone for .NET developers using Xamarin, C# & .NET). Which just goes to prove that the more you put yourself out there and give, the more people will take notice and wish to help.<\/p>\n

Some of the initial contributors admitted themselves that they hadn\u2019t had much OSS experience, which suited me to the ground as I hadn\u2019t had much experience running an OSS project! We would be learning this together.<\/p>\n

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Live Streaming on Twitch<\/h2>\n

As an aside, around about the same time I started development of the site, I started to live stream some of my coding sessions on Twitch. Something I found to be incredibly fun and something I wish to get back to when I have more free time. If you haven\u2019t already thought about checking out Twitch for either watching or broadcasting coding sessions, I recommend you check it out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Showing GitHub Issues on the Site<\/h2>\n

So by this time, I had created a few issues in GitHub. However, what I really wanted to do was to pull in issues from GitHub and show them on a page on the site. Eventually I managed to tweak some code I found to do this.<\/p>\n

The result is a list of the outstanding GitHub issues on the \/OpenSource page<\/a> on the site that people can see, without even having to go to the repository on GitHub.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hacktoberfest<\/h2>\n

Hacktober presented another opportunity to enable and encourage the community to help improve the site, so following the very simple project maintainer steps, I added \u2018hacktoberfest\u2019 as a topic in my repository and this attracted additional contributors to tackle outstanding issues. What I would love is for contributors to continue to help improve the site well after Hacktoberfest has ended!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Things to do<\/h2>\n

Having never run an open source project before, I have learnt a few things that I need to do to improve the project on GitHub:<\/p>\n