Hi everyone,

As you know, MaidSafe has always been a proponent and adopter of the open source ethos. Of course, this means that our code is publicly viewable. But it goes beyond that – it also means that the project is a collaborative exchange between us and the community, and user-submitted patches already make up a portion of the SAFE Network codebase.

Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to contribute to a project as large and complex as the SAFE Network. This post is to announce some of the things that we at the SAFE Client Libs team have been working on to remove this friction.

Call for Help

Over the past month or so, I’ve been adding the help wanted tag to GitHub issues whose fixes and implementations we are entrusting to the community. Why are we doing this? We want to get new people involved, enriching the SAFE Network with their ideas and perspectives. But we also want to assist in our users’ growth as developers by offering easy opportunities for contribution, as well as guidance and mentoring.

New Documentation

Client Libs is one of the best starting points for someone new to the SAFE Network codebase. It does not require as much specialized knowledge as some of our other repositories. But until now it was not really clear how to contribute for someone not already familiar with the project. So, in addition to adding the help wanted tag, we have written a Guide to contributing page on our wiki, as well as some other helpful pages in the sidebar, including a high-level introduction to Client Libs.

Getting Started

Again, here is a list of issues that we’ve marked help wanted . Some are also tagged easy or good first issue ; we recommend tackling one of these first. The easy issues should take no more than a day, even for someone completely new to open source – some of these issues don’t even require programming knowledge!

To get started, just comment on the issue and one of us will assign it to you, as well as give you some pointers on how to get started. I will also be available for mentoring and answering any questions

Thanks for reading