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What we mean by "contributing" to Pants

· 3 min read
Carina C. Zona
Carina C. Zona
Pants Maintainer

We embrace that open source is not code alone. We truly value a wide spectrum of contributions to Pants project and to the thriving community that underlies it. Here are some of the many ways anyone can potentially contribute to the vitality of Pants...

On many open source projects, a "contributor" is narrowly defined as someone who contributes code specifically. Other forms of contributions often are overlooked or underappreciated in those communities. It's a loss for everyone. At Pants project, we embrace that open source is not code alone. We value a wide spectrum of contributions to the project and to the community that underlies it. When you do something that helps more people benefit from Pants, that's a win for them and a win for Pants. Thank you!

Here are some of the many ways anyone can contribute to the vitality of Pants:

  • Tell peers why you use Pants and who you think will benefit from Pants too. Spread the word! Whether that be in a casual chat, tweet, blog post, tutorial, presentation, or video.
  • Contribute to the collaborative spirit of the community by helping a fellow user on Slack or GitHub.
  • Star the project on GitHub https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants. It's an easy action that helps build exposure and momentum.
  • Contribute to the docs using the "Suggest Edits" button.
  • Contribute to the codebase by suggesting an idea, making a feature request, giving feedback on an issue or dev release, opening an issue, or starting a pull request.
  • List your organization or open source project on the Who Uses Pants page https://www.pantsbuild.org/page/who-uses-pants
  • Add a testimonial https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/testimonials
  • Publish a case study of how your goals are being served by Pants. This is easily one of the most powerful things you can do!
  • Give a talk about Pants, or about one of our other favorite topics. We always love to see more talks about subjects such as build engineering, developer tooling, devops, developer productivity, CI/CD, testing, code quality, scaling, remote execution, Python, Rust, etc. We're also happy to help speakers develop the talk, and provide a friendly audience for rehearsing it.
  • Ask your organization to consider partnering with us on things like adding support for JavaScript, other languages, or a key new feature. The more resources available, the faster we can add that one more thing you've been eagerly waiting for...
  • Point out when a community member contributes meaningfully to making the project or culture even better, or even just when a community member made your day better. We want to support and reward people in doing good things, and ideally we'd also like to help them become future collaborators on Pants Team.
  • Guest post on this very blog, and/or blog elsehwere. Here are lots of great topic ideas to help kickstart your brainstorming!

We welcome more ideas for this list. We invite you to join us on Slack and contribute your own suggestions. Thanks for supporting Pants with your time, knowledge, perspective, kind spirit, enthusiasm, and energy. Pants is better because of you.