by At Codeminer, we value contributing to open source projects and believe that these contributions are important for the growth and development of the software community. Since 2019, we’ve been taking a more active stance on contributions to open source projects, and this year we have created a new support model for developers to contribute to open source.
We nicknamed it #GivingBack, and it’s how our developers who are in between projects get to focus exclusively on contributing to open source projects. They are free to choose, but are advised to look for more relevant projects, with an active community and recent commits, ensuring that their contributions are of greater value to others.
Today, we would like to show some of our efforts to collaborate with the open source community in the year 2022.
The projects
A few of the projects we’ve contributed to this year are some of the most known, such as Jest and NextJs, in JavaScript and TypeScript, the Phoenix Framework in Elixir, and Rubygems in Ruby. These libraries are used by many different projects and are also often used by Codeminer’s customers.
Some of these contributions arose from the needs and bugs that our developers encountered while using them, while others were chosen simply because we wanted to improve the tools we use and allow others to do the same.
Below is a chart of the ten most popular projects we contributed to this year.
We can see Casa at the top of the chart – an american project maintained by the Ruby For Good organization. According to their own description, CASAs or Court Appointed Special Advocates, are volunteers who advocate on behalf of youths in their county’s foster care system.
Second, we have Grommet, a React-based framework that provides accessibility, modularity, responsiveness, and themes in a ready-to-use package.
Third, we have Material-UI, a set of ready-to-use core components based on React that implement Google’s Material Design. In addition to these, we contribute to more than 30 other projects, but we only list the top ten so as to keep the chart manageable.
The numbers
Regarding statistics of all 137 contributions made this year, 76.9% were merged, 8.2% closed and 14.9% are open awaiting review or other pending matters.
Some of the closed PRs were due to a misunderstanding of the issue at first or because the project maintainer decided to change a different approach to the proposal in the contribution. PRs opened based on the average lifetime (time from PR opening to being merged) of previous contributions, which should take approximately one month, between reviews and issue discussions. Of course, this time varies from project to project and time available from the maintainers, but it’s interesting to get a general idea.
Production over the months shown in the graph below was also interesting.
As we continued with the initiative, we learned the best ways to contribute to projects, allowing us to improve over the months. Since 2022 also marked the start of our trainee program, which endend in April, we had a significant growth in contributions in May. Our developers had reached the second stage, where they were assigned to opensource issues to gain experience in real projects instead of just studying projects as they had done before. Each of them had received mentorship from the company’s most experienced developers at the start of the program, and the result is shown in the growth of contributions in the months after April. October Hacktoberfest month, as expected we had the highest volume of contributions (every programmer likes swags); which led to the retreat in November.
This post was just a piece of what Codeminer did for opensource projects this year. We thank all the CodeMiner developers who contributed and all the maintainers who reviewed our contributions, we hope to continue contributing more and more to the community and always with better quality than before.
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