Great Starting Points for Contributing to Open Source

The Real Python Podcast

What’s it like to sit down for your first developer sprint at a conference? How do you find an appropriate issue to work on as a new open-source contributor? This week on the show, author and software engineer Stefanie Molin is here to discuss starting to contribute to open-source projects.

Stefanie is a data scientist and software engineer on Bloomberg’s Security Data Science team. She recently wrote an article titled “5 Ways to Get Started in Open Source.” We discuss finding ways to contribute that fit your interests and developer skills. We dig into the experience of participating in community sprints at a conference.

Stefanie is the author of Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas. We also discuss the different processes between writing technical articles and authoring a book.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Intel.

Course Spotlight: Documenting Python Projects With Sphinx and Read the Docs

In this video series, you’ll create project documentation from scratch using Sphinx, the de facto standard for Python. You’ll also hook your code repository up to Read The Docs to automatically build and publish your code documentation.

Topics:

• 00:00:00 – Introduction
• 00:02:55 – Being asked about how to get started
• 00:07:13 – Differences in short vs long form writing
• 00:09:03 – What was your introduction to contributing?
• 00:17:52 – What are additional benefits of contributing?
• 00:22:32 – Sponsor: Intel
• 00:23:22 – Sprints as an entry point
• 00:34:36 – Other requirements of a sprint
• 00:36:05 – Differences in conferences
• 00:41:52 – Other sprint experiences
• 00:42:50 – Contributing examples to documentation
• 00:45:59 – Video Course Spotlight
• 00:47:11 – Looking for good first issues
• 00:52:04 – Is this a bug?
• 00:54:10 – Proposing a new feature
• 00:56:36 – Data Morph and working on personal projects
• 01:07:29 – Showing up in the Python community
• 01:12:14 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
• 01:14:59 – How can people follow the work you do online?
• 01:15:28 – What do you want to learn next?
• 01:18:23 – Thanks and goodbye

Show Links:

• 5 Ways to Get Started in Open Source - by Stefanie Molin - Level Up Coding
• seaborn: Statistical Data Visualization - Documentation
• Docstring Validation using Pre-Commit Hook - numpydoc
• Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas: A Python data science handbook for data collection, wrangling, analysis, and visualization, 2nd Edition - Amazon.com
• Episode #173: Getting Involved in Open Source & Generating QR Codes With Python – The Real Python Podcast
• Episode #8: Docker + Python for Data Science and Machine Learning With Tania Allard – The Real Python Podcast
• Mentored Sprints for Diverse Beginners - PyCon US 2023
• Episode #177: Welcoming PyPI’s Safety & Security Engineer Mike Fiedler – The Real Python Podcast
• Data Morph: Moving Beyond the Datasaurus Dozen - Level Up Coding
• Data Morph: A Cautionary Tale of Summary Statistics – Slides
• Anscombe’s quartet - Wikipedia
• How to Set Up Pre-Commit Hooks - Stefanie Molin
• Dog Speaks In Italian Accent To Sound Like His Owner - Bored Panda
• Stefanie Molin (@StefanieMolin) / X
• Stefanie Molin - Personal Website

Level up your Python skills with our expert-led courses:

• Building Python Project Documentation With MkDocs
• Data Cleaning With pandas and NumPy
• Documenting Python Projects With Sphinx and Read the Docs

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