I am excited to announce a new focused project for contribution – Developer Ergonomics/Experience, otherwise known as DX.  Last week we gave a preview that today we would be announcing 2 contribution projects.  This is an unpaid program where we are looking for 1-2 contributors who will dedicate between 5-10 hours/week for at least 8 weeks.  More time is welcome, but not required.

What does DX mean?

We chose this project as we continue to experience frustration while fixing bugs and debugging test failures.  Many people suggest great ideas, in this case we have set aside a few ideas (look at the dependent bugs to clean up argument parsers, help our tests run in smarter chunks, make it easier to run tests locally or on server, etc.) which would clean up stuff and be harder than a good first bug, yet each issue by itself would be too easy for an internship.  Our goal is to clean up our test harnesses and tools and if time permits, add stuff to the workflow which makes it easier for developers to do their job!

What is required of you to participate?

• A willingness to learn and ask questions
• A general knowledge of programming (this will be mostly in python with some javascript as well)
• A promise to show up regularly and take ownership of the issues you are working on
• Good at solving problems and thinking out of the box
• Comfortable with (or willing to try) working with a variety of people

What we will guarantee from our end:

• A dedicated mentor for the project whom you will work with regularly throughout the project
• A single area of work to reduce the need to get up to speed over and over again.
  • This project will cover many tools, but the general problem space will be the same
• The opportunity to work with many people (different bugs could have a specific mentor) while retaining a single mentor to guide you through the process
• The ability to be part of the team- you will be welcome in meetings, we will value your input on solving problems, brainstorming, and figuring out new problems to tackle.

How do you apply?

Get in touch with us either by replying to the post, commenting in the bug or just contacting us on IRC (I am :jmaher in #ateam on irc.mozilla.org).  We will point you at a starter bug and introduce you to the bugs and problems to solve.  If you have prior work (links to bugzilla, github, blogs, etc.) that would be useful to learn more about you that would be a plus.

How will you select the candidates?

There is no real criteria here.  One factor will be if you can meet the criteria outlined above and how well you do at picking up the problem space.  Ultimately it will be up to the mentor (for this project, it will be me).  If you do apply and we already have a candidate picked or don’t choose you for other reasons, we do plan to repeat this every few months.

Looking forward to building great things!

https://elvis314.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/a-team-contribution-opportunity-dx-developer-ergonomics/