Getting Started

1. Sign up for the development mailing list. This is where we discuss development plans, make announcements, and so on. It's also a great place to ask for help.

2. Sign up for a GitHub account if you do not have one yet. Contact [youngian] with your GitHub username so he can add you to the organization roster.

3. Know how to ask for help. Sooner or later something is going to go wrong, and it's better to get a second opinion than end up stuck and frustrated by yourself. You can ask questions on the mailing list, or you can find people on [plansdev] to contact directly for troubleshooting or guidance.

4. If you're new to Ruby, Rails, Git, GitHub or anything else about our development process, you can find tutorials, reading, and other resources in Development Resources.

5. Follow the quickstart guide in the project readme to install and set up the project. This should get you to a point where you can run the server and use the app in a browser, and also to where you can run the test suite and have everything pass.

6. Find an issue from the open tickets and either assign it to yourself or comment on it to say you're working on it. You might try looking at the bite-sized tickets to get started, and the extra credit tickets for the next step. Or if you don't want to sort through tickets, just start using the app until something breaks, and try to fix it!

7. Once you have a change you're ready to submit, you'll want to create a "pull request". See the Git branching guide for details. Don't worry about your branch being perfect -- if there's stuff you don't know how to do, let us know in the pull request and someone will help you get it ready for prime time.

8. Congratulate yourself on your accomplishment. Then, look for a new ticket to work on and repeat!