February 7, 2017

Apollo Contributor Week Starts Today!

Jonas Helfer

Jonas Helfer

As Thea wrote in her announcement blog post last week, the idea for contributor week came to us when we were having our own hack week back in November. We had a lot of fun working on cool projects like the Apollo Chrome Developer Tools together, so we started contributor week to share the fun with you!

Let’s get straight to the point. Here’s what you’ll find in this post:

  1. A schedule for the week
  2. Instructions for contributors
  3. Participating repositories

1. Contributor week schedule

Kickoff live broadcast: Tuesday Feb 7th 10:30am — 11:30am PST

Watch our Youtube live video to kick off contributor week. We’ll go over the logistics of the week, make some suggestions for things to do, introduce the maintainers of various repos, and answer questions.

Office hours: Every day 11:30am -12:30pm PST

We’ll have office hours on the #contributor-week slack channel in the Apollo Slack every day from 11:30am — 12:30pm PST. Office hours means members of the core team will be available to answer your questions in real time to help you get unstuck, make PRs and fix issues!

The core team and maintainers will be available outside of office hours and on the weekend as well, but we may not respond right away.

Closing live broadcast: Tuesday Feb 14th 10:30am — 11:30am PST

We’ll have a live broadcast at the end of contributor week, where we’ll do a quick recap of all the amazing work done by the community and share demos of projects that people worked on.

Shortly after contributor week, we’ll send out some Apollo swag to everyone who participated in contributor week. Expect to get stickers, a t-shirt or a mug from us!

2. Instructions for contributors

Right now

  1. Join the #contributor-week on Apollo Slack.
  2. Watch the kickoff hangout on YouTube.
  3. Follow us on Medium and Twitter to get updated on the details.
  4. Check out the list of starter issues and project ideas.

Contributing throughout the week

There are a lot of ways to get involved, and this week we’re going to pay extra attention to make sure it’s easy to get your PR accepted.

  • Tackle some smaller issues to get started: Pick an easy issue from the list of starter issues and claim it by commenting on it, and opening a PR mentioning the issue.
  • Improve the docs: Another good way to get started is to make a PR improving the docs. Any extra bit of information or piece of experience you have from developing apps with Apollo is welcome, since that will help new developers get started.
  • Tackle a more challenging issue: Once you get comfortable with the process, you can pick a medium or hard issue to work on!
  • Try one of the suggested projects: If you’re looking to start something new or tackle a bigger chunk of work, check out the various project ideas submitted by the maintainers.

Of course there are many other ways to participate, like writing a blog post, making and example app, or writing a tutorial. If you have some ideas of your own, don’t hesitate to let us know and we’d love to help out!

3. Participating Repositories

Apollo and GraphQL are much more than just the repositories under Apollo GraphQL on GitHub. There’s a whole community around it, and many of those repositories are participating in Apollo Contributor Week along with the largest GraphQL server communities and GraphQL backends-as-a-service.

List of participating repositories and organizations

We especially encourage you to work on projects that improve the integration between Apollo and the partner repo and build examples or create tutorial content.

We’re excited to work with you!

Now that you know all there is to know about contributor week, let me tell you that we’re really excited to work with you! We’re always looking for ways to be more engaged and better serve the community, so we really hope that you’ll use this opportunity to work more closely with us to make Apollo work better for you.

Contributor week won’t last forever, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have to stop contributing. If you want to do more, definitely let us know! We’re always looking to add committed maintainers to our projects, and have contributors who help us get a handle on issues filed.

Written by

Jonas Helfer

Jonas Helfer

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