ShinyCMS

I got a Google alert today letting me know that GitHub had automatically created this page encouraging people, especially less experienced people, to get involved with the ShinyCMS-ruby project - triggered by my tagging a few issues as 'good first issue'.

This made me wonder if there was anything I could do to further help and encourage anybody who's thinking about picking up one of those issues, but maybe isn't quite confident in doing so. I've always admired the way the Dreamwidth project brings new people into open source development and gives them a really positive start - I don't imagine I'll be getting quite as much interest as them :-p but I'd like to do whatever I can if anybody out there is interested. I was helped by the community on freenode a huge amount when I started out many years ago and I'm always looking for ways to pay that forward! In my day job I spent most of the last four years leading a team of 6-8 developers, and one of my favourite things about that role has been mentoring people who are just starting out in their careers. I'd love to use that experience to help people who are taking their first steps into the open source community. :)

So, tl,dr; if you're new to programming, and you'd like to try to tackle one of the issues on this project, but you're not quite sure whether to go for it - please get in touch. I will be happy to help you in any way I can - whether that's talking the issue through in more detail so you're sure you understand it, helping you think about how to approach the problem, pair coding with you to fix it together, or any other way I can help - whatever will make you feel comfortable to give it a go!

You can get in touch with me by emailing 2020 at denny dot me, or by posting a comment on whatever issue has taken your fancy, and we'll figure it out from there.

Tags: help offered community mentoring open source