What are Dev Days?

The ASWF is organizing an event called "Dev Days," which is kind of a hackathon with the goal of getting people who haven't contributed to these projects (or maybe any open source project) to pick a "1-day" task and make their first contribution. It's scheduled for October 12-13, 2023 (you pick whichever day or time split is convenient to you). During that time, the senior developers of the project will be monitoring the mail list, Slack, and GitHub, standing by to answer questions and help you through the process.

Check out the ASWF Dev Days site and the participating projects, and if you are interested in participating, please register! If you have questions, please reach out, or join the #devdays slack channel on the ASWF Slack instance.

If you're reading this, you're probably interested in contributing to the Open Review Inititiave. So also say hi on #open-review-initiative Slack channel - introduce yourself, and let us know what you'd like to work on (or ask for advice on what to work on).

Why is this helpful to you (and your company)?

Here's how the co-chair of Dev Days, Larry Gritz explained it to his company:

"I really can't emphasize enough how much participation in these open source projects can be an enriching professional experience: becoming more knowledgeable about, contributing to, and steering technologies that are critical to us and the industry as a whole, while collaborating with, learning from, and having your work seen and acknowledged by your peers at other studios. This event is a low-stakes way to dip your toes into any of these projects for a day.

This is for you to get something out of, but it's also for us as a company. These projects are not just fun, do-gooder tasks. Almost every one is a critical technology underlying our tools and productions. Sometimes, though, we may have only one person who is knowledgeable about the internals and feels comfortable fixing or enhancing these projects, and that's a risk given how important they are. So it's helpful for us to have multiple people who feel like they can jump in and make changes needed."

Preparation

• Check out https://sites.google.com/view/aswfdevdays/home, and sign up on the registration form.
  • Choose the Open Review Initiative project, or anything else you'd like to learn more about by working on for a day.
• If you're doing this at work, arrange with your supervisor to get the time on those days to work on it. Also, your company may need to do some advance work to ensure you have permissions to work on the project, get CLAs signed, etc. Just check with whoever seems to be experienced with open source at your company to have them tell you what, if anything, you need to do. If you are a student or independent, or know for sure that things you work on in open source are your own, then you can skip this step (you'll need to still sign an individual CLA, though).
• Between now and the event, take the time to fork, clone, and build the source so you aren't fumbling with that for the first time on the day. To help with that, please read our contribution guidelines. We know that cmake and GitHub can be tricky, please don't hesitate to ask questions if/when you get stuck using the Discussion/Issues feature in GitHub, or by reaching directly on Slack in the #devdays channel
  
  • OpenRV Contribution Guidelines
  • xStudio Readme
• Choose which effort/task you want to contribute to (see next paragraph)

Choosing the right effort for Dev Days

There are two ways of contributing - working on a existing issue or joining one of the suggested DevDays efforts.

Working on an issue as part of Dev Days

Ideally, you want to choose an issue that's big enough that you'll learn something and that will be helpful to the project, but small enough that you can probably complete it in one day. Hard enough to stretch you, easy enough to leave you excited and wanting more.

On our Issues Page, we try to mark things of this size -- maybe a one-day task for somebody who is new to the project -- with a tag called "good first issue."

• OpenRV Issues
• xStudio Issues

Here are a few other options, separate from the "good first issues":

1. Any issues tagged "documentation". Great way to get your feet wet & learn about a project for the first time.
2. Any issues tagged "bug". Great way to try to at least clarify reproduction steps, and who knows, propose a fix to the team TSC!
3. Any issue of your own choosing, that you have a particular interest in or that is related to your personal/company interests.

Joining a team effort

Below is a list of potential projects that could be explored during Dev Days. While these or usually too large to be tackled individually by people not used to the projects, you can join the experts on the effort and collaborate with them!

Effort Suggestions

Dev Days Open Review Initiative Volunteers

Join any of the volunteers in the #devdays, #open-review-initiative , or through direct messaging on the ASWF Slack.