Get a Hacktoberfest t-shirt by contributing to LiveCode

This autumn, Digital Ocean and GitHub are once again running a Hacktoberfest promotion: make four contributions to open source projects on GitHub during October, and Digital Ocean will send you a t-shirt. This is a great opportunity for you to get involved in the LiveCode open source project!

Since the successful LiveCode KickStarter in 2013, the source code for the LiveCode engine and IDE has been available on GitHub for anyone to use, learn from or contribute to.  The LiveCode language development team in Edinburgh work on making LiveCode better every day, and you can easily follow the development process by watching what goes on in the various LiveCode git repositories.

There’s a lot of work to do to continue to maintain and improve LiveCode, and occasionally the dev team doesn’t get to the thing you care about as quickly as you’d like.  With the source code available, you can ‘jump the queue’ by making the changes that you want yourself.  Just over the last couple of weeks, a couple of members of the community have been making some great improvements:

• Devin Asay (@asayd) is our community documentation coordinator, and for a few months now he’s been making some amazing contributions to the LiveCode documentation.  Every couple of days, there’s a new pull request from Devin reworking a dictionary entry or updating a guide.  Updating documentation is a great opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of how LiveCode works and how to program in LiveCode, while making a huge difference to every person who uses LiveCode.
• Trevor DeVore (@trevordevore) is a long-standing LiveCode user who uses pretty much everything LiveCode has to offer.  Over the last few days, Trevor has been making a tonne of improvements to liburl, the library that implements HTTP and FTP communication in the open source edition of LiveCode. He’s looking for help with finishing off cookie support for liburl; can you help?

As part of the LiveCode open source project, we launched the This Week in LiveCode newsletter in 2015.  Among other things, TWiL aims to keep you up-to-date with the interesting developments in the LiveCode source code.

Every issue mentions everyone who’s made a change to LiveCode during the preceding week, but also lists some suggested places to get started on contributing to LiveCode.  The best place to get started is always on the particular issue that’s bugging you!

So get stuck in, and bag your free t-shirt.

Here are some tips that will smooth the way for you:

• I recommend starting by making a small patch to the documentation to get used to the process before working up to bigger projects.
• It’s pretty likely that one of the LiveCode maintenance team will ask you to make changes (big or small) to your work.  The free git course from Code School will help you out.
• It’ll be much easier for us to review your changes if you write a good git change log message.
• If you make changes to the engine, we may ask you to add a test.
• If you’re planning to add a new feature to LiveCode or make changes to the LiveCode scripting language, please coordinate with the development team about your design before getting stuck into the code. The best way is to add an enhancement request to our issue tracker, and specifically mention that you want to implement it yourself.

Send us a photo of you wearing your free t-shirt and we will post it on the blog.