Call for Mbin contributors
Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/4475005
As you all might know it, Mbin is a rather small project with a small team. In fact the current size of the team is 1.5 developers (0.5 for the ones which only have partially time). While our active devs do what they can in their free time, this leads to slow feature and security updates, sometimes slow support and increasing stress for the remaining devs.
That's why I ask everyone who likes this project, has time of their own to donate and knows how to program with PHP (or is willing to learn it) to consider helping this project move forward.
You can start with simpler features and submit them as PRs or even just help review existing PRs if full commitment to maintaining the codebase is currently too much. We are aware that parts of our codebase contains more spagett than some Italian restaurants, but we will help every newcomer to find their way through the sources.
Every bit of support helps, as it also shows that we have a passionate userbase which does not want Mbin to wither away.Well ... as I'm not very good at writing motivational texts, just comment anything which comes to mind for this issue :D If you have ideas how to improve the chances that this post reach the right people, I would also love to hear it.
At the same time I want to bring up another topic, as transparency is important for any public project.
Some of our devs use AI assistants for generating code for PRs and also to assist with PR reviews. Simply because without it, they would not have time to continue contributing to Mbin (which would bring our devs down to 1, making it impossible to merge new PRs). On thing here is important to know: I will not call it slop nor vibe-coding, as they are a competent developer capable of understanding and managing the outputs of the agents. Still, I am very aware of the issues of AI and the general opinion on it in the Fediverse. That is why I would like to know your constructive opinions on this matter.
Also, I guarantee you that every PR is reviewed by at least one human pair of eyes.
6 replies
Noted. I've actually had fun cleaning up spaghetti code in the past. Just don't have the time ATM. Hopefully sometime in the future.
Even just you considering it is good to know, as it means there are people who want to work on the software they use regularly :)
I've been wanting to contribute for a long time, but my lack of experience in the tooling used, including PHP itself, has been scaring me off a bit. And I'm already prone to pushing things off, so yeah.
This is certainly pushing it up my priority list, and I've already started looking into the technologies involved today, but I currently don't have a lot of time, so it'll probably be a while (read: a few months) until you'll see anything from me.
Still appreciate it :)
But I have to admit, our codebase is not really the best place to start learning PHP 😅 But maybe you could start by taking part in code-reviews here and there. Even without knowledge of language details someone with a fresh view can spot things in the algorithms and general structure.
Do you have a link to the codebase?
Sure :)
Github
Docs