[swift-dev] Pathway to becoming an effective contributor

[Jacob Bandes-Storch]

Hi,
I’ve thought about this issue in the past too, and would be happy to help
write some content or at least proofread / contribute tidbits to a guide
for new developers.

As pointed out in this thread, a lot of Swift infrastructure and paradigms
comes from the LLVM community, but spelling that out in a “Getting Started”
guide would be nice. It’d also be worth gathering some tips & tricks for
developing & debugging issues, using Xcode or otherwise.

Would a Markdown document in the apple/swift repo be the best place for
such a thing?


On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 12:37 PM Halen Wooten via swift-dev <
swift-dev at swift.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I would like to start a discussion about getting started with the
> Swift Compiler. The end goal is to see if there are ways we can help
> newcomers to the compiler get started and more quickly grow into a
> more effective contributor. The motivation is that I've had a
> surprising amount of trouble with my starter bug. Swift is amazing and
> I would love to contribute more regularly, but I also don't want to
> burden the core team.
>
> I know that documentation on a huge project like this is a
> non-starter, but I wonder if we could have better information on the
> contribution process, which likely wouldn't change frequently. For
> example, I learned through a conference talk that Swift uses LLVM's
> lit testing. I couldn't find that in any of Swift's documentation. The
> docs explain how to run tests, but not how to write them. I would be
> happy to help out with documentation if we can decide on changes that
> would be useful.
>
> Also, after I'm able to get my starter bug merged, I have no idea
> where to go from there. I don't want to take another starter bug and
> deprive someone else of the opportunity to contribute (although maybe
> that's an unnecessary restriction I'm placing on myself), but I'm also
> not in a place where I could take on something much larger.
>
> The learning curve for a compiler is always going to be high, but does
> anyone have ideas on how we could assist newcomers with their first
> starter bug and then transitioning into something larger?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Halen
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