Great Starting Points for Contributing to Open Source

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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