First Timers Only and New Labels

Inspired by Kent C. Dodds’s awesome “First Timers Only” article, we recently added new labels to all Pinax repositories.

Besides labels like bug or question, we now have labels named up-for-grabs, first-timers-only, difficulty: easy, difficulty: medium, and difficulty: hard.

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You may wonder what these labels mean so let’s take a closer look at them:

  • up-for-grabs: Issues marked with this label haven’t been assigned to anyone yet. We would love for you to submit patches and pull requests for these issues. If you create an issue and would love for someone else to submit a patch or PR to solve the issue, please use this label. Please note that most issues haven’t been marked with this label yet, we are still working on it, so if you see an issue which hasn’t been assigned to anyone yet but isn’t marked with this label, please feel free to add the label and/or submit a patch and PR.

  • first-timers-only: We’d like to give people who have never contributed to open source before a chance to tackle these issues in order to make their first OSS contribution. If you have contributed to open source before, please let someone else take these issues. We try to give detailed instructions for first-timers-only issues in order to set people up for success and because we want people contributing to OSS for the first time to have the best experience possible. Please see this and this issue for examples of first-timers-only issues (there are more to come). If you know someone wanting to make their first OSS contribution, we would love for you to share these issues with them. When you create a new issue, which you think would be a great first-timers-only issue, please assign the label and ping @ossanna16 on GitHub. Anna Ossowski, our Pinax project community manager, would love to work with you in order to create a great first-timers-only issue with great instructions. If you’re looking for other great first-timers-only issues, check out the Your First PR and Up For Grabs websites.

  • difficulty: easy: This is an easy issue to fix and would be great for a programming beginner or someone new to open source. When assigning the different levels of difficulties please think from a programming beginner’s point of view. When you started programming, would you have been able to solve this issue or would it have been too difficult for you? We created these 3 difficulty labels to make it easier for people wanting to contribute to Pinax to figure out which issue might be a good one for them to work on.

  • difficulty: medium: This is an issue which requires more time or programming knowledge to fix than a difficulty: easy issue but you don’t have to be a programming expert to fix it.

  • difficulty: hard: This issue probably requires some time and a good bit of programming knowledge to fix and could be a challenge but this shouldn’t keep you from trying to submit a patch for it ;)

If you have any other ideas for things we can improve, labels we should add, have questions, or need help, please join our Pinax project Slack channel! We would love to hear from you!