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How to Contribute to RxJS

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To continue our series, highlighting best practices for developers interested in contributing to their favorite technologies, I met up with my good friend and creator of RxJS, Ben Lesh. If you would like to check out that interview, you can see it here.

What is RxJS?

RxJS is a library for reactive programming that uses Observables to make it easier to compose asynchronous or callback-based code.

It is a rewrite of Reactive-Extensions/RxJS with better performance, better modularity, better debuggable call stacks, all while staying mostly backwards compatible, with some breaking changes that reduce the API surface.

Ben Lesh

Ben Lesh is an international speaker and RxJS Core Team Member. His involvement with the framework started a few years ago, when he was asked to work on a rewrite due to his open-source experience in other projects at Netflix.

What to Know Before You Get Started

According to Ben, the codeofconduct.md and contributing.md documents are the best places for new developers to start. It is crucial that new contributors abide by community standards and the correct commit format, so be sure to read through!

Quick Tips!

-Everything in RxJS is written under src/internal, where you can look at all the internals of RxJS. -The commit message generates the changelog, which can be found on changelog.md.

The Best Way to Get Started

When I asked Ben what areas of the repository were best for new contributors, and what areas needed the most attention, he of course said: documentation.

But it’s true! According to Ben, devs can simply click the “Improve Documentation” button, and do a direct commit.

Presently, the team could significantly benefit from contributors interested in checking links to ensure that they are not broken, revising grammatical errors, ensuring all information is up to date, and adding edit buttons in the documentation for individual pages.

However, if developers are looking for a different challenge, they can see open requests for contribution by checking out the “help wanted” tag in the issues section.

Quick Tips! -Don’t simply submit a bunch of PRs to get on the contributors list! Focus on contributing helpful, meaningful work that will advance RxJS! -Because issues are not checked every day, you want to make sure that there is not already a PR for it, and that it hasn’t already been assigned to someone. Also, make sure to look through the PRs to ensure that the issue is not being addressed in both open and closed PRs.

What About Attending Core Team Meetings?

Core Team meetings typically address in-depth issues and questions related to RxJS, and are not open to the public. However, contributors can receive invitations based on their PRs and need, so if developers are interested in attending Core Team meetings, the best thing to do is create a presence in the RxJS Community!

Though meetings aren’t open or recorded, community members can view the issues, and see the tag “agenda item” to see what topics will be addressed at upcoming meetings. Usually, the discussions are commented on in the issues.

Quick Tips! -If you are interested in getting involved, but don’t want to contribute code, go out into the world and review external articles or Stack Overflow, and help in the community! -Blog posts and explanations about RxJS are also valued by the community and Core Team!

Ready to Begin?

You can find the RxJS repository here!