NuGet Up For Grabs Items

In my last post, I described how we’re trying to improve and streamline contributor guidelines to make it easy for others to contribute to NuGet.

Like all product cycles anywhere, we’re always running on tight time constraints. This helps us to maintain a tight focus on the product. We don’t want to the product to do anything and everything. However, we do want to deliver everything needed (along with double rainbows and unicorns) to meet our vision for this first release.

The best to meet those goals is to get more contributions from outside the core team. And the best way to do that is to remove as many roadblocks as possible for those interested in contributing.

What’s Up For Grabs?!

When approaching a new project, it can be really challenging to even know what bugs to tackle. So much is happening so quickly and you don’t want to step on any toes.

So we’re trying an experiment where we mark issues in our bug tracker with the tag “UpForGrabs”. The idea here is that any item marked in such a way is something that none of the core team will work on if someone else will take it. Some of these are assigned to core team members, but we hope that someone externally will come along and start a discussion and say, “Yeah, I’ll handle that and provide a pull request with high quality code.”

That would so rock!

So how do you find out about our Up for Grabs items? It’s really easy.

1. Visit our issue tracker.
2. Search for “UpForGrabs” (sans quotes) as in the screenshot below.

Once you find an item you’d like to tackle, start a discussion and let everyone know. That’ll make sure that if anyone else has started on it, that you can work together or decide to choose something else.

Note that if the status is “Active”, it’s likely that someone has already started on it.

Another way to search for these items is to use the Advanced View on the issue tracker and add a filter with the word “UpForGrabs” and set the status to “Proposed”.

Improving CodePlex.com

This reminds me, it’d be really nice if I could create an URL that took you directly to this filtered view our issue tracker. That’s something I need to log with the CodePlex.com team.

In the meanwhile, we have a list of issues we’d love for you to vote up that would help us manage NuGet more effectively on CodePlex.com.