Write Contributing Guidelines

[winsmith]

The contributing guidelines should be a short markdown document in the root of the repository called CONTRIBUTING.md. It should be written in the Markdown format. In it, there should be a number of guidelines to keep in mind when contributing to ablator.

Below are the points that definitely need to be included, feel free to add more if you feel they are necessary. The contributing guidelines is a living document, so it is ok if the first version is not perfect.

If the instructions are unclear, ask in the discussion below this ticket, and we will work together to make them clearer.

General

• Be friendly and respectful to your fellow contributors and adhere to the Code of Conduct
• Have a look at the Django Contributing Intro if you're unsure
• Ablator is only compatible with python 3
• Once you have the ablator project running on your machine, create a superuser by running python manage.py createsuperuser
• When you have a superuser, you can run python manage.py create_dummy_data to fill your database with example data

Tickets and Triage

• before you start working on code, find a ticket that describes what you want to work on.
• If you are a beginner, or new to the project, consider the tickets labelled "easy pickings" -- these are usually small in scope and not too tricky to figure out
• If you want to help out but don't know where, look for tickets labelled "Help Wanted"

Getting your code into ablator

• If there is no ticket, create one and mention that you are going to work on this. It is recommended that you wait until a someone from the ablator team approves your ticket, so you don't waste your work if e.g. the team doesn't want the feature you want to create. State the problem, why it is a problem, and your intended solution.
• Follow the PEP8 style guide, with the exception that the allowed line length is 120 characters instead of 80
• use meaningful names for classes, functions and variables
• Write helpful documentation strings

Pull Requests and Reviews

• New contributions should come via pull request
• Be sure to run flake8, eslint, and the tests before posting your pull request -- otherwise the automated testing will mark your PR as incomplete
• Make sure that the tests are running successfully -- otherwise the automated testing will mark your PR as incomplete
• write a short, descriptive Title for your Pull request
• reference the ticket(s) that are touched by your pull request
• write a concise description of what your pull request does, and how the changes can be tested
• Your Pull Request will only be merged after a review process. Don't be discouraged if that goes back and forth between you and your reviewer a few times. They are trying to improve your code and provide helpful hints