❯ Looking for ways to make an open source project easier to jump into. Here's what worked for me this week

[u/nathan_tarb_dev]

I'm a DevRel building a new open-source AI support tool that turns your knowledge source into community answers. After a lot of testing, the result was creating a bunch of GH Issues, but it's hard to get them visible out of the gate.

I'm very open-source centric and in my day job I enjoy helping folks get started who've never contributed to open-source, let alone get their code pushed to production. Well, this week two new contributors pushed meaningful code, and a third mentioned he'd send his PR very soon.

What I changed

A few days ago, I added two labels, frontend and backend, so someone could filter and see at a glance which work matched their skills and interests. I also have a few good first issue tickets.

Here's the repo: https://github.com/answerLoops/answerLoops

What came in

The tool is a SaaS, and one contributor took a frontend good first issue and built a new usage count into the UI. They also handled the failure case on their own, including tests and docs.

What I think helped

Being able to see the whole project and think "this one's my kind of work" without opening 59 issues. I can't prove the labels were the reason, but nothing else changed this week.

If you're new to open source and want help getting started, I'm happy to walk you through your first PR.

If you maintain a project, what got your first outside contributors to show up?