Getting your project set up for newcomers

The first part of having a welcoming project is to give the appearance that maintainers want newcomers. That might sound flippant, but too often, it doesn’t appear that way. First impressions are everything in an open source project, and how your project is perceived is gauged by that first impression. Individuals and organizations use, participate, and invest in projects that they perceive to be run well.

Let’s kick things off by looking at the basics of the infrastructure.

Setting up your project infrastructure

When you first come to an open source project, you likely have several expectations.

First, you want to find the code itself. We see most projects these days leverage a service such as GitHub or GitLab, which offer free code hosting services to open source projects. Additionally, there’s the advantage of being close to other open source projects, which can help your project be more naturally discoverable...