[Mailman-Developers] Website re-org?

[Terri Oda]

On 2015-12-05 5:44 PM, Adam McGreggor wrote:
>> Since
>> we get a lot of GSoC student aspirants and folk who meet one of us
>> and think "these seem like nice people, maybe I'll make my first
>> open source contribution with them,"  I think there's good reason to
>> have something a bit more extensive than the existing CONTRIBUTE
>> stuff.
>
> I imagine there's content that's available already, too, for My First
> Project, for some reason, I'm thinking it's the sort of thing Mozilla
> will have done a fair few iterations on (and will be nicely licensed).

Yes, such content exists, and we can link to some of it, but it's 
typically too general for a beginner who doesn't yet know how to handle 
that.   I spend literally hundreds of hours a year talking to students 
about where they get stuck as new contributors as part of my role as the 
Python GSoC coordinator, plus I hang out in the OpenHatch channel 
(they're one of many orgs that works to make the "how do i get started?" 
docs better) and I hear the "I got this far but then there were no 
architecture docs and I got overwhelmed" and variants on it a lot.

We need those architecture docs and that bridging stuff that goes from 
"how to github" to "what does mailman want in a pull request and how 
many tests do I need to include if I want to make Barry happy?"

It's a moot point to argue about it, anyhow.  Either I write this now 
for the website or I write it 40 times on IRC in February while the 
students complain that I'm not answering them fast enough, and I know 
which one I'd prefer! ;)

  Terri