What is the session about?
Contributing to Wikimedia projects as a developer can seem difficult at the beginning. The learning curve can be quite steep and easy tasks that fit the experience level of newcomers are rare. - So what to do, when you’re new?

This workshop will show some ways how developers can find themselves parts in the code that need attention and how to address them. Things probably included here are:

• Showing simple ways to discover smaller issues in the code base - for example via automated code analysis.
• How to find and refactor messy code blocks.
• Find easy tasks on Phabricator.

To increase your chances on getting good reviews, we will discuss best practices for fixing issues and refactoring code, including the most relevant do's and don'ts. The presentation will finish with tips how to to give your commits meaningful names and a brief introduction on how to submit fixes, and poke the right people to get them reviewed.

During the workshop part of the session participants can use the given input to find and fix issues while getting assistance from experienced Wikimedia developers.

What will attendees take away from this session?
Attendees will learn simple ways to contribute as a developer to Wikimedia projects, without getting too deep into the details of the implementations. Best practices will help them with getting reviews and submitting patches. This knowledge can then be used as a starting point to get more into the codebase and contributing.

Length of session
~45-60 min

Today 2pm to 3pm
Room: Drummond East (Level 3)

Video recording of session, on Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Improving_MediaWiki_what_to_do,_when_you%27re_new.webm