We removed “good first issue” label

The inspiration of this page is a note of Alex Kladov. Perhaps you want to read an original page and not to read this one.

Origin of “good first issue”

Reading reddit made us confident: there are lots of young people who want to enter opensource, but don’t see a first step. It felt correct to give them “good first issue” label, so they can easily find a task to start with.

In reality majority of those people find such thing, create a PR that doesn’t even compile, share a beautiful story on linkedin and disappear.

TLDR it didn’t work for us.

Apparently most of the strong contributors, even the youngest ones, may find a way to enter having a well structured mindset. And every project needs those. We don’t need to meet a Staff Engineer, but we need a sober and a consistent person. And we are use those people don’t need “good first issue”.

Consistency is the key

Strong people come inevitably.

The best you can do is not to scare them:

• help them with basic rituals: build, test, style guide
• give them a chance to make mistakes: nothing wrong to have a wrong assumption, that’s why you maintain it
• don’t be stuffy: you can forgive minor style mistakes if you can’t enforce them automatically, a way better would be to make a follow up PR with a fix to demonstrate your expectations and tag the original contributor to share learnings; you choose between good code or good coders

Little practice helps convert one time contributors to the consistent ones.

Outcome

All in all, it helps to avoid people who look for a quick dopamine and meet brilliant people who act, not talk.

Asking a question on reddit “how do I enter” is a procrastination itself, not a step forward.

You simply need to start, not ask. Make mistakes.