What’s it like to sit down for your first developer sprint at a conference? How do you find an appropriate issue to work on as a new open-source contributor? This week on the show, author and software engineer Stefanie Molin is here to discuss starting to contribute to open-source projects.

Stefanie is a data scientist and software engineer on Bloomberg’s Security Data Science team. She recently wrote an article titled “5 Ways to Get Started in Open Source.” We discuss finding ways to contribute that fit your interests and developer skills. We dig into the experience of participating in community sprints at a conference.

Stefanie is the author of Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas. We also discuss the different processes between writing technical articles and authoring a book.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Intel.

Course Spotlight: Documenting Python Projects With Sphinx and Read the Docs

In this video series, you’ll create project documentation from scratch using Sphinx, the de facto standard for Python. You’ll also hook your code repository up to Read The Docs to automatically build and publish your code documentation.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:55 – Being asked about how to get started
00:07:13 – Differences in short vs long form writing
00:09:03 – What was your introduction to contributing?
00:17:52 – What are additional benefits of contributing?
00:22:32 – Sponsor: Intel
00:23:22 – Sprints as an entry point
00:34:36 – Other requirements of a sprint
00:36:05 – Differences in conferences
00:41:52 – Other sprint experiences
00:42:50 – Contributing examples to documentation
00:45:59 – Video Course Spotlight
00:47:11 – Looking for good first issues
00:52:04 – Is this a bug?
00:54:10 – Proposing a new feature
00:56:36 – Data Morph and working on personal projects
01:07:29 – Showing up in the Python community
01:12:14 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
01:14:59 – How can people follow the work you do online?
01:15:28 – What do you want to learn next?
01:18:23 – Thanks and goodbye

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[BONUS] Peter Hayward on Attending a Prototype Convention