How to work on bugs

Thank you for helping us make Diaspora awesome! ;)
So you’d like to start contributing, but you don’t know where to begin? This is a fairly large project, which means it’s probably best to get your hands dirty with a small fix so you can get used to the codebase.

Make an account on Github
(If you don’t already have one.) This is necessary in order to contribute the code you write.
Find a bug to work on
One possibility is to look at the issues list on Github and look for bugs with the “quickfix” label. Those bugs often cover a wide selection of topics for various skillsets and interests (Ruby/Rails, HTML/CSS, JavaScript…).
Another way is to look for the weekly Bug Mash entries on the Devblog. Those contain a list of easy-to-start-with bugs that come with an outline of how to attack them.
Claim the issue
If you selected your bug directly from the issue tracker, just leave a note in the comments to that bug, saying you started to work on it.
The Bug Mash posts contain their own information of how to claim them. Typically it’s by responding to the email on the mailing list or leaving a comment on the blog post.
Before you start
Now, there are a few things we want you to keep in mind before you start to work on the bug.
- You will need to Installing and Running Diaspora
- Please skim through our page on Git-Workflow so that there will be no problems merging your fix.
- You migh also be interested in an An Introduction to the Diaspora Source and the FAQ for developers.
If you need help with any of that, run into a problem or get stuck somewhere, don’t hesitate to ask, either on the mailing list or come to our How we use IRC.
Write awesome code
We strive to encourage TDD (Test Driven Development) or BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) when possible. In short that means before you write some actual code, you should write a test firsts that fails because of the bug, then fix the bug, which in turn also makes the test pass.
Submit your fix
Now it’s time to push your git branch to your fork on Github and make a pull request for it. Look Git Workflow or here for specific instructions on how to do that. Also, it’s best to let us know that you are finished with a quick email to the mailing list or comment on the issue, pointing to the pull request.
Done
Great! You just fixed a bug. We really can’t thank you enough for it. <3