Open Source Participation

Why Smarter. Smarter is developed in public, with issues, discussions, pull requests, code review, conventional commits and automated releases, so a course or a capstone can end with a real contribution to a real project. A merged pull request is a public, verifiable piece of work for a student’s portfolio.

Look at. Issues labelled good first issue, and the project’s pull requests.

Read. Contributing, Code of Conduct, Developer Guidelines, Semantic Versioning Guide.

Exercises.

• Choose an issue, discuss the approach with the maintainers in the issue before writing code, and see a pull request through review.

• Improve the documentation: a clearer explanation, a missing example, or a corrected command. This is the easiest first contribution, and one of the most valued.

• Read the AGPL-3.0 license, and explain what it allows and requires, and how it differs from the MIT and Apache licenses.

Note

Contact the maintainers in GitHub Discussions before a large class starts contributing, so that they can prepare suitable issues and plan for the reviews.

Course plans. Three complete, ready-to-teach plans, each with a schedule, graded assignments and rubrics, two capstone projects, recommended texts, further study and technical prerequisites. See Course Formats and Grading for what the formats have in common.

• Classroom bootcamp: 8 hours
• Two-week online course: 6 hours
• Four-week online course: 12 hours

See the Smarter Instructor Guide to install Smarter and set up a class.