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Onboarding#

Focusing on the developer onboarding process into a project is a very important step to make a repository popular: no one wants to struggle for hours to setup an application and start developing on it.

A streamlined and easy setup process is thus critical to having meaningful contributions on an open-source repository.

Rules of the OFF on-boarding process#

The setup steps should be as simple as possible and stick by the following rules:

  • Respect the user's time:
    • reduce the amount of time needed to setup a project to the least amount possible.
    • but also make it as fast as possible to take into account code modifications (ideally live reload, if needed a container restart)
  • Make it easy for non-developers to contribute: the dev setup should not require a high comprehension of the application at hand.
  • Repeatable and tested developer workflow: the dev setup should be automated and tested with every pull request to ensure that it does not break accidentally when making changes.
  • Make it possible to reach a wide audience: try to make the dev deployment platform agnostic, at least for commands used to develop in a normal process. On windows, git comes with git bash which should be priviledge as a console. You can use symlink on windows.

The make dev command should work across all repos to streamline the applications setup process.