Becoming a Drupal Code Contributor

About two months ago we got a comment from a listener, KeyboardCowboy, about questions they had around contributing code to Drupal. Join Addison Berry, Karen Stevenson, Andrew Berry, Kyle Hofmeyer, Joe Shindelar, and Juampy Novillo Requena as we discuss those questions, and chat about how we got involved with contributing code, the challenges we face, and list out things that can be confusing or trip people up as they begin learning how the Drupal community works on code together.

Here is the text of the original comment that this podcast is based on (along with some handy links we've added):

Technical Newbs Podcast?

(asked by KeyboardCowboy)
I've been developing in Drupal since 5.2 but only within the last couple of years have really gotten involved in contributing and trying to be more involved in the community. I know the docs are resource out there on this are plentiful but I would love to hear some Drupal experts talk about some of the finer points of collaboration and contributing such as how they got started and their current process now.

I don't have much free time, but I want to help with D8 and Drupal is the first collaborative system I've worked in, so removing the grey area around these points could be the push I need to dive in more quickly.

1. What's your process to create a patch? Submit a patch? Test a patch?

• Simple Patch (git diff)
• Advanced Patch (git format-patch)

2. How/Does this process differ between Contrib and Core?

3. How big can patches get and how do you handle the big ones?

• Re-rolling big patches

4. Can more than one person work on the same patch? If so, how do you handle conflicts?

• Interdiff: Show a diff between to patches so that you can see what's changed

5. What, exactly, do each of those statuses mean in the issue queue and who is responsible for changing the status of an issue?

• Issue statuses and priorities
• Issue status transitions

6. What was/is your biggest challenge in collaborating on Drupal projects/issues/bugs/features?

• Core mentoring/office hours
• Novice tag in Drupal.org issues
• Issue summary template

7. How do you decide on a release state for a project (alpha, beta, rc)

• Release naming conventions
• Release types

And I'm sure I could think of others. Just thought I would pose that as an eager developer with limited time. Thanks again for keeping these podcasts going.

Ask away!

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