Contributing

First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! ❤️

All types of contributions are encouraged and valued. See the table of contents for different ways to help and details about how this project handles them. Please make sure to read the relevant section before making your contribution. It will make it a lot easier for us maintainers and smooth out the experience for all involved. The community looks forward to your contributions. 🎉

And if you like the project, but just don't have time to contribute, that's fine. There are other easy ways to support the project and show your appreciation, which we would also be very happy about:

• Star the project
• Tweet about it
• Refer this project in your project's readme
• Mention the project at local meetups and tell your friends/colleagues

Code of Conduct

This project and everyone participating in it is governed by the uw-coursemap Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to git@uwcourses.com.

I Have a Question

If you want to ask a question, we assume that you have read the available Documentation.

Before you ask a question, it is best to search for existing Issues that might help you. In case you have found a suitable issue and still need clarification, you can write your question in this issue. It is also advisable to search the internet for answers first.

If you then still feel the need to ask a question and need clarification, we recommend the following:

• Open an Issue.
• Provide as much context as you can about what you're running into.
• Provide project and platform versions (nodejs, npm, etc), depending on what seems relevant.

We will then take care of the issue as soon as possible.

I Want To Contribute

Legal Notice

When contributing to this project, you must agree that you have authored 100% of the content, that you have the necessary rights to the content and that the content you contribute may be provided under the project licence.

Reporting Bugs

Before Submitting a Bug Report

A good bug report shouldn't leave others needing to chase you up for more information. Therefore, we ask you to investigate carefully, collect information and describe the issue in detail in your report. Please complete the following steps in advance to help us fix any potential bug as fast as possible.

• Make sure that you are using the latest version.
• Determine if your bug is really a bug and not an error on your side e.g. using incompatible environment components/versions (Make sure that you have read the documentation. If you are looking for support, you might want to check this section).
• To see if other users have experienced (and potentially already solved) the same issue you are having, check if there is not already a bug report existing for your bug or error in the bug tracker.
• Also make sure to search the internet (including Stack Overflow) to see if users outside of the GitHub community have discussed the issue.
• Collect information about the bug:
  • Stack trace (Traceback)
  • OS, Platform and Version (Windows, Linux, macOS, x86, ARM)
  • Version of the interpreter, compiler, SDK, runtime environment, package manager, depending on what seems relevant.
  • Possibly your input and the output
  • Can you reliably reproduce the issue? And can you also reproduce it with older versions?

How Do I Submit a Good Bug Report?

You must never report security related issues, vulnerabilities or bugs including sensitive information to the issue tracker, or elsewhere in public. Instead sensitive bugs must be sent by email to git@uwcourses.com.

We use GitHub issues to track bugs and errors. If you run into an issue with the project:

• Open an Issue. (Since we can't be sure at this point whether it is a bug or not, we ask you not to talk about a bug yet and not to label the issue.)
• Explain the behavior you would expect and the actual behavior.
• Please provide as much context as possible and describe the reproduction steps that someone else can follow to recreate the issue on their own. This usually includes your code. For good bug reports you should isolate the problem and create a reduced test case.
• Provide the information you collected in the previous section.

Once it's filed:

• The project team will label the issue accordingly.
• A team member will try to reproduce the issue with your provided steps. If there are no reproduction steps or no obvious way to reproduce the issue, the team will ask you for those steps and mark the issue as needs-repro. Bugs with the needs-repro tag will not be addressed until they are reproduced.
• If the team is able to reproduce the issue, it will be marked needs-fix, as well as possibly other tags (such as critical), and the issue will be left to be implemented by someone.

Suggesting Enhancements

This section guides you through submitting an enhancement suggestion for uw-coursemap, including completely new features and minor improvements to existing functionality. Following these guidelines will help maintainers and the community to understand your suggestion and find related suggestions.

Before Submitting an Enhancement

• Make sure that you are using the latest version.
• Read the documentation carefully and find out if the functionality is already covered, maybe by an individual configuration.
• Perform a search to see if the enhancement has already been suggested. If it has, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.
• Find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project. It's up to you to make a strong case to convince the project's developers of the merits of this feature. Keep in mind that we want features that will be useful to the majority of our users and not just a small subset. If you're just targeting a minority of users, consider writing an add-on/plugin library.

How Do I Submit a Good Enhancement Suggestion?

Enhancement suggestions are tracked as GitHub issues.

• Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the suggestion.
• Provide a step-by-step description of the suggested enhancement in as many details as possible.
• Describe the current behavior and explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why. At this point you can also tell which alternatives do not work for you.
• You may want to include screenshots or screen recordings which help you demonstrate the steps or point out the part which the suggestion is related to. You can use LICEcap to record GIFs on macOS and Windows, and the built-in screen recorder in GNOME or SimpleScreenRecorder on Linux.
• Explain why this enhancement would be useful to most uw-coursemap users. You may also want to point out the other projects that solved it better and which could serve as inspiration.

Your First Code Contribution

Generally, there should be open issues on GitHub if you just want to get your feet wet and contribute code to the project. These issues should be labeled with good first issue or help wanted.

If you run into any issues while contributing, please don't hesitate to ask for help in the issue thread, or open a GitHub discussion.

Development Workflow

We use trunk-based development. Keep in mind:

• Feature branches should be short-lived (1-2 days max)
• Make small, focused changes.
• Always ensure main is deployable

You can create a fork, then create a Pull Request (PR) to the main repository. The PR should be against the main branch, but sometimes we may target a specific branch for a feature or bug fix.

Styleguides

Whatever is in the current codebase is the style we follow. We'll add CI checks to enforce this in the future, but for now, have fun.

Commit Messages

Honestly, we don't have a strict commit message style guide. However, we do recommend that you follow these general guidelines:

• Be specific and descriptive in your commit messages. Single word messages like "fix" or "update" are not helpful.
• Describe what the commit does, not how it does it.
• If you used an AI to generate code, please mention it in the commit message. You can do this by adding a Co-authored-by: Model <noreply@example.com> commit trailer. This helps us understand the origin of the code and gives credit to the AI model used.
  • Claude does this automatically if you ask it to commit code for you. I believe the commit trailer is Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>.

Join The Project Team

Once you know the project well enough, you'll also know who to ask to join the project team. It should be whoever reviews your PRs and helps you out with issues.

Attribution

This guide is based on the contributing.md!