Improving and maintaining Trailhead presents an interesting predicament. Students who volunteer to run trips depend on Trailhead to work properly in the course of their work for the DOC, and staff depend on Trailhead to perform their jobs efficiently. Trailhead runs 24/7, and has full-time support needs, especially on weekends many trips are checking in and out.
What Trailhead does not have is a full-time staff to meet those full-time support needs. It has one part-time staff member, and a handful of people who have expressed interest in improving Trailhead, both for pay and for free. So this document is my attempt to set up some way to meet the professional needs of Trailhead with the largely unprofessional (in the sense that you are not being paid to produce work in a timely fashion) workforce that has offered to contribute to it.
Do not mistake the tone of this document: if you want to improve Trailhead I would love to have your help. I'm trying to set up a system that respects both your time and the needs of the people who use the product.
All the work that needs to be done is tracked via GitHub issues. I try to label these well, and I'll use labels like "Good First Issue" to help give you a sense of what kind of time commitment each issues requires.
The Golden Rule: Assign yourself issues you want to take on, then comment when you think you'll have them done by, and honor any commitments you make.
I will never ask you to do anything by a certain date, however, if you tell me that you're going to get something done, I do need to know when you think you'll get it done by. That is so I can plan appropriately and make sure that everything that needs doing gets done on time. It is never a problem if you can't get something done by the date I need it, it is only a problem if you commit to something you can't do. If circumstances change, or the work turned out to require more time than you though, just tell me (ideally before the date you wrote down). That's also totally fine, and if you're having technical trouble, I'm more than happy to answer questions. I just need to know the timing.
If this all makes me sound like a hardo, don't worry, none of this is that serious. I will probably kick out off the repo if you repeatedly miss commitments though.
Feel free to create issues if you want to propose a feature or you notice a bug.
Feel free to create PRs with or without issues. If there is an issue that the PR resolves, link it by referencing the issue number in the PR description.
Commits should be in the imperative, and the title of the commit should be <72 characters. See the
git log for examples.