Leading up to and during the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Megan Sullivan, Senior Software Engineer who works on documentation at Gatsby.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?
Gatsby is an open source project that's been around since 2015, and the company started in 2018. Gatsby is a framework that lets you build React apps quickly. Our goal is to make building the right thing, the easy thing. So that means that we give you some accessibility features off the bat, and we think about performance and security so you don't have to. You can focus on building your UI as quickly as possible.

What contributions are you welcoming?
For Hacktoberfest we have 2 main ways for you to contribute to our project. The first way is to work on the Docs. Our documentation has a few Issues open looking for contributions. The second way is to contribute to the code. There is one issue in particular, for the TypeScript migration - there's a long list of files that we're transferring over to TypeScript, and we would love your help with that.

What skills do people need to contribute?
Our project is written in JavaScript, it uses Node and React, and also Graphql, so depending on what part of the codebase you want to contribute to, you'll need to know some or all of those. We also use npm, or yarn, depending which part of the codebase you're in. And if you want to contribute to our Docs, those are written in markdown.

How do folks get started?
The best way to get started is to go and look at our GitHub Issues list. There are a few different labels you can look for there. For now you can look for the hacktoberfest label. Once Hacktoberfest is over you can look for the good-first-issue or help-wanted labels. On our website we have Contributing guide that outlines advice on how to get started, our Code of Conduct, as well as recommendations to make sure your contribution gets accepted!

Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.