Contributing Code to the Repo

First of all, Welcome! There is nothing more exciting than connecting with someone new who wants to add some code. Even little bits of fixup and adding help text are very useful.

Secondly, don’t be intimidated by the alien nature of github and git. These involve some very distinct concepts that take time to master. There are good tutorials. Also, one of the great things about git is that you can’t do any damage. If you click on the wrong thing, you don’t have to worry that you’re going to delete a bunch of irreplaceable code. That’s one of the things that makes git so effective.

The Learning Path

First, learn about the git tool.

Git is a change tracking database that stores copies of code files in a way that makes it easy for people to collaborate without stepping on each other’s changes.

The first thing you have to do is get a solid grounding in the basics of git itself.

I highly recommend the tutorials here: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-About-Version-Control

Go up until 3.6 and then you can stop. I’ve never bothered to learn much beyond 3.6, and have never needed it. But you really want to know the stuff up to 3.6

Second, learn about Github.

Github is a web service like Salesforce that provides a hosted version of git. Do this tutorial: https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/