Introduction
We are in October which is well known as the month of Hacktoberfest in the open-source community. During this month, beginner developers learn to contribute to open-source projects.
I am participating in this event for the last three years. Last year, I also participated as a maintainer. This year, I am also participating as a maintainer and trying my best to help the developers.
So, I am here to help you by providing some tools you can use while contributing to an open-source project. This tool will be helpful in:
- Searching Code from large codebases
- Finding Issues to resolve
- Online Editor for Quick edit
So, let's get started.
Documatic
A search engine for your codebase; Ask Documatic a question and find relevant code and insights in seconds
Documatic is a platform where you can find relevant code from a codebase by just asking a question. The question can be "How to connect to the database?" and it will give you code regarding the database. The code need not have any word related to the database but it will return you the all code related to this. The most relevant code snippets will be at the top.
The repository to which you want to contribute, fork it in your GitHub profile. After forking, connect your GitHub profile with Documatic and start searching the codebase. This will save you time as you don't have to manually search or wait for the maintainer's comment.
You can check the platform at: https://app.documatic.com/
You can try the working of the platform here: https://www.askyourcode.com/
CodeTriage
Discover the easiest way to get started contributing to open source. Over 66,078 devs are helping 7,320 projects with our free, community-developed tools
CodeTriage is an awesome platform to find open-source repositories to contribute. You can filter the repository by more than 100 programming languages. The repositories are red, yellow, and green showing the complexity of the project as Advanced, Intermediate, and Beginner-friendly respectively.
Good First Issue
Making your first open-source contribution is easier than you think. Good First Issue is a curated list of issues from popular open-source projects that you can fix easily. Start today!
Good First Issue provides you with the issue that is more likely to be solved by beginner developers. You can explore more than 20 programming languages. You can find the description, language, stars, and last activity of every repository.
GitPod
Spin up fresh, automated dev environments
for each task, in the cloud, in seconds.
GitPod provides you with an online environment in a workspace to code. The code editor is the online version of VS Code. I used it as a chrome extension. Whenever I need to do a quick edit or to verify the code before merging I use GitPod.
You can download it as the chrome extension from here
readme.so
The easiest way to create a README
Readme.so is one of the best platforms to generate readme for your project. The drag-and-drop features enable you to choose templates for Title, and Contribution guidelines, run locally, and other important aspects of a Readme file. You can easily download the created file in a markdown(.md) with the name README.md.
Connect with Me
Conclusion
I hope, this set of tools will help you in the open-source journey. Take full advantage of this month by participating in Hacktoberfest and other hackathons.
Thanks for reading the blog post.
Top comments (17)
What are your favourite tool for open source contribution?🤔
Great read! I’m definitely going to look into CodeTriage, it sounds very interesting!
Yep, It's one of the best for finding issues.
I'll have to try out Documatic, that service sounds intriguing - but I wonder if its effectiveness is dependent on how opinionated a codebase is.
If you want some more suggestions on tooling for OSS, I'd suggest giving a read to my post How I maintain Open Source projects, if you're not using dependabot I'd highly encourage you to check it out
Try Documatic whenever you get a chance. I have read the mentioned article and it is awesome. As I am also participating as a maintainer in Hacktoberfest, the number of Issues and PR has increased drastically. This led to a missing notification and also poor quality of workflow.
The article has provided me with lots of ideas to improve my workflow. Especially, I am going to use the Stale to notify me of missed issues and PR.
Thanks for the article.
A great tool I have recently discovered is transfer.sh:
Transfer.sh us allows file upload without the need for an account, up to a maximum of 10 GB. The files are stored in the service and are available for download for 14 days. After this period the files will be automatically deleted.
How many times have created online snippets just for sharing? Using transfer.sh makes easier to share a piece of code.
That looks quite interesting tool. I can easily share my code to others now.
We are building an open source {free} Postman alternative: Hoppscotch - API request builder for web.
👽 Open source API development ecosystem - https://hoppscotch.io
I have heard about the platform. It is quite interesting. Will gonna try it soon.
A nice post to read!!
Thanks for your word!
Thank you for sharing. I'm going to try CodeTriage.
That's a really awesome tool for finding issues.
Thank you for readme.md tools
Yep, that's an interesting tool🚀🔥
We are in October, which is well known as Hacktoberfest month in the open source community. During this month, novice developers learn how to contribute to open source projects. I have been participating in this event for three years. Last year I also participated as a maintenance technician. This year I also participate as a maintainer and I do my best to help the developers.
So, I'm here to help by providing you with some tools you can use while contributing to an open source project. This tool will be useful in:
Search for code from large code bases
Find problems to solve
Online editor for quick editing
Documatic sounds like it's amazing. Is there a way to get it without a work email?