I think it could be useful to gather some of our communal thoughts and notes on how to contribute to open source Elixir projects. Including dos and don’ts, common practices, etc.

This could serve as a starting point for people who are new to Elixir and perhaps even to programming in general. How can we help our new friends to hit the ground running?

We could include general things, such as:

• Cloning a development version of a library from GitHub.
• Testing one’s changes before submitting a pull request.
• “Squashing” commits before submitting a pull request.
• Submitting a pull request to open source projects.

Those topics, which are not specific to Elixir, might be covered elsewhere. If so, then maybe we can reference other sources and/or create an index of useful resources.

There might also be some Elixir-specific aspects, such as:

• Including a development version of a library in an applicatoin for testing.
• Best practices when it comes to implementing tests.
• Steps to take before submitting a pull request, e.g. running tests, code formatter, etc.

Those are just some suggestions to get the conversation going.

What do you think? Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Do you have any suggestions?

Such things may of course vary a great deal from project to project, depending on how the particular project is set up, but perhaps there are some basics things most of them have in common.