Open Stack

On 2014-02-12 14:42:17 -0600 (-0600), Dolph Mathews wrote:
[...]
> There's a lot of such scenarios where new contributors can
> quickly find things to contribute, or at lest provide incredibly
> valuable feedback to the project in the form of reviews!
[...]

I heartily second the suggestion. The biggest and best thing I did
as a new contributor was to start reviewing changes first thing. An
initial contributor, if they have any aptitude for software
development at all, will be able to tell a ton about our development
community by how it interacts through code review. The test-centric
methodology, style guidelines and general level of
acceptance/tolerance for various things become immediately apparent.
You also get to test your understanding of the source by watching
all the mistakes other reviewers find that you missed in your
reviewing. Refine and repeat.

Getting a couple of very simple changes in right away also helps you
pick up the workflow and toolset, but reviewing others changes is a
huge boon to both the project and the would-be contributors doing
the reviewing... much more so than correcting a handful of
typographical errors.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley