How to contribute to the community

Getting Started
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I really love the fact that Particle is so open to invite us all in to contribute to both documentation and the firmware itself. Several threads on this forum show how engineers from Particle are working with Elites and normal users to accomplish great things and solve many problems.

However as someone who would like to contribute, I am befuddled by the operation of GitHub and the specifics of how Particle uses GitHub and expects contributors to participate. I have seen similar comments from others, so I know I am not alone. I realize it isn’t the responsibility of Particle to educate the world source code control using git, but it would be very useful to have available on this forum or in the documentation a short primer on GitHub with at least some suggested places to go read about it? And then when we know the basic vocabulary, it would be necessary to have a guide to what all the branches are in the various spark repositories are for. Where should I be looking, and where should I be making changes? And finally, an example of how to create a pull request would be helpful.

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This is a great idea. Let me see what I can whip up. In the meantime, here’s the briefest getting-started-guide for Git that I know, unfortunately this may still befuddle people with no experience with Git.

Let me think about this and also consult some team members. Do you think people would like a more comprehensive guide (and perhaps video) on how to contribute?

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That too, would be helpful I think.

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Hey @rvnash, we’re going to do a tutorial on setting up and contributing through Github in Particle Interactions with Will tomorrow. This should be helpful for non-githubbers! We’ll also speak to how the repo is laid out and what repos are the most useful for people to know about. It will be recorded and also transcribed, so hopefully this will help! I’ll also see where we might be able to put a guide with all of this info.

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I think this is a great idea thanks @christine!
I’ve just spent about an hour trying to work out why the ‘main’ folder wasn’t there after I cloned directly from https://github.com/spark/firmware.git
I know, branches are probably second nature to a lot of you but they take a bit of getting your head around!

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Thanks. I won’t be able to watch live, but I’ll watch the recording for sure!

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Hi, all! This section on how to contribute to the Particle stack goes over the different github repos that developers might find useful. Also about to post the transcript for Particle Interactions presently.

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