Questions on Getting Started as a New Contributor

[JustinFrost47]

Hi, I am Rino. I came to know about your cool Platform from a professor I know and would I love to learn and Contribute
I saw a previous post on instructions about contributing

From here: How do I get started with contribution?

but, i have some more doubts regarding this,

1. Are there specific skills you're looking for in new contributors, or is there a "nice to have" skills list? Is it acceptable if contributors are not very good in certain languages?
2. Where's the best place to discuss any doubts or questions about contributing? Is there a dedicated channel, or can we discuss it here itself?
3. Are there additional documentation or learning resources that could be beneficial for newcomers?
4. any good tasks to get started with?

Thank you for your time, and I'm eager to get involved!

[ewpatton]

@JustinFrost47

1. Are there specific skills you're looking for in new contributors, or is there a "nice to have" skills list? Is it acceptable if contributors are not very good in certain languages?

This ultimately depends on what part of the system you are looking to contribute to. We use a mix of programming languages in the App Inventor code base, but the key ones are Java (Android, GWT), JavaScript (blocklyeditor), and Swift (iOS). Contributors aren't expected to be able to contribute to all of these platforms, so if you only know, for example, Swift, you could focus on the iOS version without having to learn Java/JavaScript.

@JustinFrost47

2. Where's the best place to discuss any doubts or questions about contributing? Is there a dedicated channel, or can we discuss it here itself?

If your questions are about a particular issue on GitHub, then it is useful to ask questions on the issue thread there. Otherwise, you're welcome to discuss new changes in a thread on this community in the open source development category.

@JustinFrost47

3. Are there additional documentation or learning resources that could be beneficial for newcomers?

There are documents such as How to Add a component and App Inventor for iOS development that go into some detail. However, depending on the task at hand we can usually give more targeted advice.

@JustinFrost47

4. any good tasks to get started with?

We have some issues on GitHub marked as "help wanted" that should be easier for people not familiar with our code base to get started. If you have a specific skill set, I can try to guide you to more specific tasks that would match your experience.

Cheers,
Evan

[JustinFrost47]

I have good grasp in javascript and java and I am eager to get involved with appinventor-sources repo.

blockly editor also made me curious too, so , to work on blockly editor, should we solve issues from the original repo: GitHub - google/blockly: The web-based visual programming editor.
or should I create new issues in our fork : GitHub - mit-cml/blockly: The web-based visual programming editor. and solve them
or , should i solve issues from the mit blockly plugin? GitHub - mit-cml/blockly-plugins: Plugins for Blockly

Thanks for your time .

[ewpatton]

We're actually in the middle of an update to the blocks editor to the latest version of Blockly, so some issues might not be on the table so to speak until that process completes. If there's a particular issue that seems interesting to work on let me know and I can check whether it's something that would be affected by the upgrade work.