Yak Shaving Cream

It's been a long year of many efforts, but I'm excited to be back and blogging on ways to contribute to open source! Recently, I've been looking at a project called Tab For A Cause, which is a cute little chrome extension that enables you to donate ad revenue to the charity of your choice! They have a couple open issues, including some good starter ones for frontend developers trying to dip their toes into the open source world. In this blog post, I'll talk you through the steps of how to get set up to contribute, and at the end, I'll talk you through what I plan on doing next! Getting Started: First off, I checked out their git repo  to see if there were any contributing guidelines or any setup steps in the README . There wasn't a community contribution guidelines doc, but the README did provide some basic prerequisite requirements as well as setup steps. Installing the Prerequisites I'm working on a Mac, so I am using Homebrew to handle my installations. A...

Three weeks ago, I started a Google Summer of Code project working on a linker for Perl 6 user programs . Getting started on a new project with a new group of people is always hard, primarily because it can be hard to figure out where to start or who to reach out to. This GSoC project has been no exception. That being said, the Perl 6 community is one of the kindest, most helpful online communities I've run into and appears to have no qualms assisting a new contributor in getting up to speed. So far, the biggest challenges I've run into have been figuring out what I didn't know about how to get started, figuring out IRC, and getting my development environment set up. Figuring out what I didn't know Perl 6 is a big language. Prior to this summer, I had very little exposure to Perl, Perl 6, or interpreted languages in general. Thankfully, Perl 6 has pretty substantial documentation, and the source code is pretty well commented too. Information on linkers is har...