Contributions from the community are the lifeblood of an open-source project. Attracting new contributors, therefore, is one of the most important parts of building an active community around an open-source project. After talking to hundreds of project maintainers, we realized the easiest way to help an open-source project is to lower the bar for a new developer to start contributing.
This is why we love Hacktoberfest — it is a celebration of open-source. By encouraging contributions to new projects, everybody wins. But even “good first issues” can be a tad bit complex for new developers to dip their hands meaningfully.
And this is why we built Discover.
DeepSource’s Discover feature allows developers to find meaningful code quality issues in open-source projects, so they can make their first contribution easily.
Thousands of open-source projects use DeepSource every day to ensure they’re writing good code. Once DeepSource is integrated into a project, a beautiful dashboard shows all the code quality issues that are currently present in the code — including bug risks, anti-patterns, style violations, and performance issues, etc.
Discover bubbles up meaningful issues from each open-source repository on DeepSource and makes them discoverable. This makes it easy for new developers to make a contribution to a project — without any barrier to entry since each issue also comes with a helpful description.
If you maintain an open-source project, all you need to do is enable DeepSource on your repository by signing up. Discover’s algorithm is designed in a way that it bubbles up new and active projects, so you should see issues from your repository on Discover soon.
You can also add a badge in your project’s README file that links to the list of issues on DeepSource. This is an excellent way of redirecting visitors from your GitHub profile to discover easy pickings from the project. Read more details here.
If you’re looking for issues to fix, just create a DeepSource account and head over to Discover. You can browse through the list of active issues based on your language preferences. Once you’ve picked a few issues you want to fix, just create a PR!
But wait, there’s more! To support open-source projects that need help, we’ve constituted a one-time grant of $500 that will be given to 10 open-source projects at the end of October 2020 or this Hacktober. Visit deepsource.io/hacktoberfest for details.
Thoughts or feedback? Let us know @DeepSourceHQ. We’re also live on Product Hunt, so make sure you check that out too!
