First off, thank you for considering contributing to Amy. It's people like you that make Amy who she is today. Following these guidelines helps to communicate that you respect the time of the developers (Dudes of 708) managing and developing this open source project. In return, they should reciprocate that respect in addressing your issue, assessing changes, and helping you finalize your pull requests.
On the developer side, our main developer, Gideon Tong is doing just fine. If you spot a bug or other issue, you can file an issue on the bug tracker or submit a pull request. The team (mostly Gideon) will read through your pull rquest or issue and decide its importance and whether or not to merge any changes you have requested or proposed.
However, a bigger need that we want to fill is improving documentation and writing tutorials on how to start up and use this bot. Right now, files in the /docs folder of this repository are pretty sparse (this is true as of June 20, 2020 and has been true since the inception of this application, when it was originally in Python) and it would be good to expand on how to set up the bot and more in-depth beginner-friendly tutorials and guides to do such a thing.
Regardless, Amy is an open source project and we love to receive contributions from our community - which includes you! So there are many ways to contribute, and you can even help out by writing a blog post about Amy or trying her out so you can get an idea of what the feature set is and proposing new changes and features that could be added to her eventually as well.
Please don't use the issue tracker for support questions. Rather, join the Dudes of 708 Discord server and try to get help from us there instead. In addition, we don't support toxicity or negativity, so if you wish to propogate those kinds of attitudes, we request that you do not get involved in this project. If you believe that such an attitude is present already, please email Gideon Tong <gideon [at] gideontong.com> directly to take care of the matter.
This includes not just how to communicate with others (being respectful, considerate, etc) but also technical responsibilities (importance of testing, project dependencies, etc).
- Create issues for any major changes and enhancments that you wish to make. Discuss things transparently and get community feedback.
- Don't make major changes without input from the community first, unles you are recognized as a major developer.
- Keep feature versions as small as possible, preferrably one new feature per version.
- Be welcoming to newcomers and encourage diverse new contributors from all backgrounds.
Learning how to make a pull request for the first time? You can learn how from this free workshop series! Still confused? Also check out this great resource from First Timers Only!
There might be some language like "pull request" or even "verbose" as words you might not understand. If you can't figure it out from 3-5 minutes of Google searching, feel free to email Gideon Tong, join the Dudes of 708 Discord server, or even ask for help on common developer forums like Reddit or Stack Overflow.
Hey! You made it this far. Truth is, the contribution guide isn't finished yet, and we don't have a code of conduct. Maybe you could write one? In terms of this contribution guide, it would be good to write more tutorials on how to start your first pull request.