Development/Newbie guide

This is a guide for people who are interested in working on Growstuff, but who have little or no experience at such things.

The first thing we want to say is, welcome! We are delighted to have you with us, and want to help you learn. Teaching and mentoring are part of how we work, and we don't consider it to be unwanted overhead. As we teach people, we get more contributors, and they in turn will teach even newer people. It's a win for everyone.

First steps
If you've never programmed before, go and have a play with Try Ruby. Just 15 minutes can give you a taste of what it's like to program in Ruby, the language we use for most of Growstuff.

Here are some more free online courses you might like to try:


 * Rails for Zombies -- Rails is the framework we use to build our website
 * Try Git -- git is our version control system, that lets many of us work on the same code at once

Of course, if you don't like taking online interactive courses, there are plenty of other ways to learn. We've gathered a list of them at Learning resources.

Setting up your machine to work on Growstuff
See Development/Getting Started for how to get your machine set up with all the necessary tools, download Growstuff's code, and start working on it.

Your first story
So, you want to get your feet wet working on a real story? The first step is just to put up your hand and say that you're interested. You can tell one of the coaches for this iteration, or just say something on the mailing list.

You'll be working with someone else, in a pair, and we'll try and match you up with someone who can show you the ropes.

To find a suitable story to work on, look in Pivotal Tracker for stories tagged "easy". You can do this by searching (upper right of the tracker page) for "label:easy". These are tasks that require only a tiny tweak -- usually something like fixing a typo or some minor HTML markup -- that are good for you to get your development environment set up an learn how to work with our code. (Of course, if you're confident enough to take on a bigger story, go for it!)