In this post I want to discuss a fantastic open source project called allReady that I highly encourage all ASP.NET developers to check out. I want to share my early experience with allReady and how I got started with contributing to an open source project for the first time.
What is allReady?
allReady is project developed and managed by the charity organisation Humanitarian Toolbox. It is designed to assist management of community preparedness campaigns, bringing together the campaign organisers and volunteers to make managing the campaign easier and more efficient for all involved. It’s currently in a private preview release and is being trialled and tested by the American Red Cross with a campaign to install smoke alarms within homes in the Chicago area. Once the pilot is completed it will be available for many other important campaigns.
The project is developed using ASP.NET Core 1.0 (formerly ASP.NET 5) and uses Entity Framework Core (formerly EF7) for data access. It’s live preview sites are hosted in Microsoft Azure.
To summarise the functionality; allReady is a web application which hosts campaigns and their associated activities. The public can view campaigns and volunteer to help with activities where they have the appropriate skills. Activities may have goals such as to install a certain number of smoke alarms in a given area by a certain date. Campaign organisers can assign tasks to the volunteers and track the progress of the activity that has taken place. By managing the tasks in this way it allows the most suitable resources to be aligned with the work required.
Contributing to allReady
I first heard about the project a few months ago on the DotNetRocks podcast, hosted by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell and it sounded interesting. I headed over to the Humanitarian Toolbox website and their allReady GitHub repository to take a deeper look. Whilst I had played around with some features of ASP.NET Core and read/watched a fair amount about it, I’d yet to work with a full ASP.NET Core project. So I started by spending some time looking at the code on GitHub and working out how it was put together.
I then spent a bit of time looking through the issues, both closed ones and new ones to get a feel for the direction of the project and the type of work being done. It was clear to me at this point that I wanted to have a go at contributing, but having never even forked anything on GitHub I was a bit unsure of how to get started. I must admit it took me a few weeks before I decided to bite the bullet and have a go with my first contribution. I was a little intimidated to start using GitHub and jumping into an established project. Fortunately the GitHub readme document for allReady gave some good pointers and I spent a bit of time on Google learning how to fork and clone the repository so that I could work with the code.
I was going to spend some time in this post going through the more detailed steps of how to fork a repository and start contributing but in January Dave Paquette posted an extensive blog post covering this in fantastic detail. If you want a great introduction to GitHub and open source contributions I highly recommend that you start with Dave’s post.
It can be a bit daunting knowing where to start and opening your code up to public review – certainly that’s how I felt. I personally wasn’t sure if my code would be good enough and didn’t want to make any stupid mistakes, but after cloning down the code and playing around on my local machine I started to feel more confident about making some changes and trying my first pull request.
I took a look through the open issues and tried to find something small that I felt I could tackle for my first pull request. I wanted something reasonably simple to begin with while I learned the ropes. I found an issue requiring some UI text to display the password requirements for new account registrations so I started working on the code for that. I got it compiling locally, ran the tests and submitted my first pull request (PR). Well done me!
It was promptly reviewed by MisterJames (aka James Chambers) who welcomed me to the project. At this point it’s fair to say that I’d gone a bit off tangent with my PR and it wasn’t quite right for what was needed. Being brutally honest, it wasn’t great code either. James though was very kind in his feedback and did a good of explaining that although it wasn’t quite right for the issue at hand, he’d be able to help me adjust it so that it was. An offer of some time to work remotely on the code wasn’t at all what I hadn’t expected and was very generous. James very quickly put some of my early fears to rest and I felt encouraged to continue contributing.
The importance of this experience should not be underestimated, since I’m sure that a lot of people may feel worried about making a pull request that is wrong either in scope or technically. My experience though quickly put me at ease and made it easy to continue contributing and learning as I went. The team working on allReady do a great job of welcoming and inducting new contributors to the project. While my code was not quite right for the requirement, I wasn’t made to feel rejected or humiliated and help was offered to make my code more suitable. If you’re looking for somewhere friendly to start out with open source, I can highly recommend allReady.
Since then I’ve made a total of 23 pull requests (PRs) on the project 22 of which are now closed and merged into the project. After my first PR I picked up some more issues that I felt I could tackle, including a piece of work to rename some of the entities and classes around a more relevant ubiquitous language. It’s really rewarding to have code which you’ve contributed make up part of an open source project and I feel it’s even better when it’s for such a good cause. As my experience with the codebase, including working with ASP.NET Core has developed I have been able to pick up larger and more complex issues. I continue to learn as I go and hopefully get better with each new pull request.
Challenges
Some people will be worried about starting out with open source contributions, but honestly I’ve had no bad experiences with the allReady project. I do want to discuss a couple of areas that could be deemed challenging and perhaps are things which might be putting others off from contributing. I hope in doing so I can set any concerns people may have aside.
The area that I found most technically challenging early on was working with Git and GitHub. I’d only recently been exposed to Git at work and hadn’t yet learned how to best use the commands and processes. I’d never worked with GitHub so that was brand new to me too. Rebasing was the area that as first was a bit confusing and daunting for me. This post isn’t intended to be a full git or rebasing tutorial but I did feel it’s worth briefly discussing what I learned in this area since others may be able to use this when getting started with allReady.
Rebasing 101
Rebasing allows us to take commits which have been made by other authors (or yourself on other branches) and replay our commits on top of them. It allows us to keep the base of our work up-to-date and ensure that any merge conflicts are handled before a pull request is submitted/accepted.
I follow the practice of creating a branch for each issue which I start work on. This allows me to keep that work separate and is also required in order to submit a pull request on GitHub. Given that a feature might take a number of days to complete, it’s likely that the project master branch will have moved on by the time you are ready to submit your PR. You could pull in the master branch changes and then merge them into your branch but this leads to a quite messy commit history and in the case of one of my PRs, didn’t work well at all. Rebasing is your friend here and by rebasing your issue branch on top of the up-to-date master you can ensure that the commit timeline is correct and that all of your changes work with the latest code. There are occasions where you’ll need to handle conflicts as the rebase occurs, but often a rebase can be a pretty simple exercise.
Dave Paquette’s post which I highlighted earlier covers all of this, so I recommend you read that for some great guidance first. I thought it might be useful to share my cheat sheet that I noted down a few months ago and which I personally found handy in the early days until I had memorised the flow of commands. Out of context these may not make sense to Git newcomers but hopefully after reading Dave’s guide you may find these a nice quick reference to have to hand.
git checkout master
git fetch htbox
git merge htbox/master
git checkout issue-branch-1
git rebase master
git push origin issue-branch-1 -f
To summarise what these do:
First I checkout the master branch and fetch any changes from the htbox remote, merging them into my master branch. This brings my local repository up-to-date with the project code on GitHub. When working with a GitHub project you’ll likely setup two remotes. One is to your forked GitHub repository (origin in my case) and one is to the main project repository (which I named htbox). The first three commands above will update my local master branch to reflect the current project master branch.
I then checkout my issue branch in which I have completed my work for the issue. I then rebase from my updated local master branch. This will rewind your issue branch’s changes, update with the master branch commits and then reply each of your branch’s commits onto the updated base (hence the term rebasing). If any of your commits conflict with the master’s changes then you will have to handle those merge conflicts before the rebase operation can continue.
Finally, once my issue branch is rebased, my feature re-tested to ensure that it still works as expected and then unit tests all running green I can push my branch up to my forked repository hosted on GitHub. I tend to push only my specific issue branch and will sometimes require the -f force flag to ensure that the remote fork takes all of my changes exactly as they appear locally. Forcing is most common in cases where I’m updating an existing PR and have had to rebase a second time based on more changes to the master branch.
This leaves me ready to submit a pull request or, if I already have a PR submitted for my branch, GitHub will update that existing PR with my new commits. The project team will be happy as this will make accepting and merging the PR an easier task after the rebase as any conflicts with the current master will have been resolved.
Whilst understanding the steps required to rebase was a learning curve for me, it was in the end, easier than I had feared it might be. Certainly if you’re familiar with Git before you start then you’ll have an easier time, but I wouldn’t let it put you off if you’re a complete newcomer. It is in fact a great chance to learn Git which will surely be useful in future projects.
Finding Time
Another challenge that I feel worth mentioning, since I’m sure many will consider it true for them too, is finding time to work on the project. Life is busy and personally finding time to work on the code isn’t always that easy for me. I don’t have children, so I do have more time than those with little ones to take care of, but outside of work I like to socialise with friends, run a side photography business with my wife, play sports and enjoy the outdoors. All things which consume most of my spare time. However I really enjoy being a part of this project and so when I do find myself with spare time, often early in the morning before work, during the weekend or sometimes even during my lunch break, I try to tackle an issue for allReady. There are a range of open issues, some large in scope, some smaller; so often you can often find something that you can make time to work on. No one puts pressure on the completion of work and I believe everyone is very appreciative of any time people are able to contribute. I do recommend that you be realistic in what you can tackle but certainly don’t be put off if you’ll pick up pieces of work as and when you can. If you do start something but find yourself out of time, I recommend you leave a short comment on the issue so that other contributors know what’s happening and when you might be able to pick it up again.
Sometimes, with larger issues it might make sense for them to be broken down into sub issues, so that PR’s can be submitted for smaller pieces of work. This allows the larger goals to be achieved but in a more manageable way. If you see something that you want to help with, leave a comment and start a discussion. Again the team are very approachable and quick to respond to any questions and comments you may have.
Time is valuable to us all and therefore it’s a great thing to donate when you can. Sharing a little time here and there on a project such as allReady can be really precious, and however small a contribution, it’s sure to be gratefully received.
Benefits
Having touched on a few possible challenges I wanted to move onto the benefits of contributing which I think far outweigh those challenges.
Firstly and in my opinion, most importantly, there is the fact that any contribution will be towards an application that will be helping others. If you have time to give an open source project, this is one which really does represent a very worthwhile cause. One of the goals of Humanitarian Toolbox is to allow those with software development skills to put their knowledge and experience directly towards charitable goals. It’s great to be able to use my software development skills in this way.
Secondly it’s a great learning experience for both new and experienced developers. With ASP.NET Core in RC1 currently and RTM perhaps only a few more months away this is a great opportunity to work with the new framework and to learn in a practical way. Personally I’ve learnt a lot along the way, including seeing the Mediatr library being used. I really like the command/query pattern for data access and I have already used it on a work project. There are a number of experienced developers on the team and I learn a lot from the code reviews on my pull requests and watching their commits.
Thirdly, it’s a very friendly project to be involved with. The team have been great and I’ve felt very welcomed and involved in the project. Some of the main contributors are now part of the .NET monsters on Channel 9. It’s great to work with people who really know their stuff. This makes it a great place to start out with open source contributions, even with no prior experience contributing on GitHub.
Code-a-thon
On the 20th February Humanitarian Toolbox held a code-a-thon at two physical locations in the US and Canada as well as some remote contributions from others on the project. I set aside my day to work on some issues from the UK. It was great being part of a wider event, even if remote. I recommend that you follow @htbox on twitter for news of any future events that you can take part in. If you’re close enough to take part physically then it looked like good fun during the live link up on Google Hangouts. As well as the allReady project people were contributing to other applications with charitable goals such as a missing children’s app for Minnesota. You can read more about the event in Rocky Lhotka’s blog post.
How you can help and get started?
No better way than to jump into the GitHub project and start contributing. Even non developers can get involved by helping test the application, raising any issues that they experience and providing suggestions for improvements. If you have C# and ASP.NET experience I’m sure you’ll quickly get up to speed after checking out the codebase. If you’re looking for good issues to ease in with then check out any tagged with the green jump-in label. Those are smaller, simpler issues that are great for newcomers to the project or to GitHub in general. Once you’ve done a few fixes and pull requests for those issues you’ll be ready to take a look at some of the more complex issues.
If you need help with getting started or are unsure how of how to contribute then the team will be sure to offer help and advice along the way.
Summary of links
As I’ve mentioned and included quite a lot of links in this post, here’s a quick roundup and a few others I thought would be useful:
http://www.davepaquette.com/archive/2016/01/24/Submitting-Your-First-Pull-request.aspx
https://github.com/htbox/allready
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMHQ4xrqudcTtaXFw4Bw54Q – Community Standup Videos
http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/HTBoxTwinCitiesCodeathonFeb2016Recap.aspx
Have you enjoyed this post and found it useful? If so, please consider supporting me:
Thanks for sharing your experiences on this project, I’ve been wanting to “jump-in” (heh) myself for some time, but unfortunately nerves (having never contributed to OSS before myself) and a limit of time (I’m one of those with little ones that you’ve mentioned) have held me back. I need to just bite the bullet and get into it! Hopefully the inspiration your post has given me to overcome my nerves will stick around for long enough, until I can find that time that I need!!
Thanks for your comment Bron. I’m so pleased you found it useful. It sounds like you’re where I was a few months ago. Before you know it, you’ll be hooked!
Thank you Steve, this is an awesome post. We do appreciate all the work you, and all the other volunteers, have put into the project, It’s really shaping up well, and that’s due to the community that has been involved.
Thanks again
Thanks Bill. It’s great to be involved.
This is a great post. I’ve been looking for an open-source project to contribute to for a few years now & this is the first one that has me really inspired. I really like the idea of contributing to something that will help people….
Just trying to fix a couple of build errors and then hopefully I can submit my first PR!
Hi Nick.
Thanks for the comment. I’m very pleased that you found it useful. It’s also great to hear you’ll be contributing to allReady. It’s been a great experience for me. If you have any questions, do reach out.
Steve
Steve,
Thank you for this great post. I was hoping you can guide me to my next steps. I understand “AllReady” is nearing completion but am hoping I can still provide some assistance or at least be ready for the next project. I have gone through all of the development steps and have found my self stuck at UI tests. The UI Test cannot login unless I interact with the web page to open the drop down. Once the test agent is authenticated, it cannot read the Hello Administrator@someurl.com. This text is again hidden behind the drop down.
How does one get invited to Slack?
Hi Brett,
I’m glad you found it useful. There’s plenty to do, so we’d love to have you contributing. We don’t actually run the UI tests much at the moment. I wouldn’t worry about those for now. I tend to use the WebOnly solution and as long as the main unit tests run, that’s good enough for PRs. The front end has changed a lot and will change again so UI tests are a bit out of date. I’ll drop you an email for any further support. I’ve also asked for you to be invited on Slack.
Cheers,
Steve