Skip to article frontmatterSkip to article content

Contributing to The Turing Way

🎉🎈🍰 Welcome to The Turing Way repository! 🍰🎈🎉

💫 We’re excited that you’re here and want to contribute. 💫

We want to ensure that every user and contributor feels welcome, included and supported to participate in The Turing Way community. We hope that the information provided in this document will make it as easy as possible for you to get involved.

We welcome all contributions to this project via GitHub issues and pull requests. Please follow these guidelines to make sure your contributions can be easily integrated into the projects. As you start contributing to The Turing Way, don’t forget that your ideas are more important than perfect pull requests. ❤️

If you have any questions that aren’t discussed below, please let us know through one of the many ways to get in touch.

Table of contents

Been here before? Already know what you’re looking for in this guide? Jump to the following sections:

Joining the community

The Turing Way is a community-led and collaboratively developed project. We, therefore, require that all our members and their contributions adhere to our Code of Conduct (CoC). Please familiarize yourself with our CoC that lists the expected behaviours. We have also provided details for CoC reporting and enforcement, which can be read in our Community Handbook.

Inclusivity

The Turing Way aims to be inclusive to people from all walks of life and to all research fields. These intentions must be reflected in the contributions that we make to the project.

In addition to the CoC, we encourage intentional, inclusive actions from contributors to The Turing Way. Here are a few examples of such actions:

Get in touch

There are many ways to get in touch with The Turing Way team!

Receiving Updates

Coworking and Real-Time Collaboration

Contributing through GitHub

Git is a really useful tool for version control. GitHub sits on top of Git and supports collaborative and distributed working.

We know that it can be daunting to start using Git and GitHub if you haven’t worked with them in the past, but The Turing Way maintainers are here to help you figure out any of the jargon or confusing instructions you encounter! ❤️

In order to contribute via GitHub, you’ll need to set up a free account and sign in. Here are some instructions to help you get going. Remember that you can ask us any questions you need to along the way.

Writing in Markdown

GitHub has a helpful page on getting started with writing and formatting on GitHub.

Most of the writing that you’ll do will be in Markdown. You can think of Markdown as a few little symbols around your text that will allow GitHub to render the text with a little bit of formatting. For example, you could write words as bold (**bold**), or in italics (_italics_), or as a link ([link](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ)) to another webpage.

Also when writing in Markdown, please start each new sentence on a new line. Having each sentence on a new line will make no difference to how the text is displayed, there will still be paragraphs, but it makes the diffs produced during the pull request review easier to read! ✨

Where to start: issues

Before you open a new issue, please check if any of our open issues cover your idea already. If you open a new issue, please follow our basic guidelines laid out in our issue templates. There are 3 issue templates to choose from.:

  1. New Chapter Template (preview here): This issue is a place to discuss matters relating to writing a new chapter on a new topic or adding a subchapter in an already existing chapter.
  2. General (preview here): Use this template for a general issue related to the book, community, process or ideas.
  3. Bug Report (preview here): With this template, create an issue report that can help others repair something that is currently broken. This can be used for reporting errors like typos and broken links. The issue template will automatically be rendered in the comment section of the new issue page, so all you need to do is edit the “Lorem ipsum” sections.

Issue labels

The list of labels for current issues can be found here and includes:

If you are a new member of The Turing Way and are looking for opportunities to start as a reviewer of contributions made on our Github repository, these pull requests are a great starting point for you. Issues like small modifications, typo errors and minor bug fixes are resolved by these PRs which are easy to review as a beginner.

Making a change with a pull request

We appreciate all contributions to The Turing Way. THANK YOU for helping us build this useful resource. :sparkles::star2::dizzy:

All project management, conversations and questions related to The Turing Way project happen here in The Turing Way repository. This is also where you can contribute directly to writing or editing chapters of the book!

The following steps are a guide to help you contribute in a way that will be easy for everyone to review and accept with ease :sunglasses:.

1. Comment on an existing issue or open a new issue referencing your addition

This allows other members of The Turing Way team to confirm that you aren’t overlapping with work that’s currently underway and that everyone is on the same page with the goal of the work you’re going to carry out.

This blog is a nice explanation of why putting this work in upfront is so useful to everyone involved.

Remember, if you open a new issue, please follow our basic guidelines laid out in our issue template. The issue template will automatically be rendered in the comment section of the new issue page so all you need to do is edit the “Lorem ipsum” sections.

2. Fork The Turing Way repository

This is now your own unique copy of The Turing Way. Changes here won’t affect anyone else’s work, so it’s a safe space to explore edits to the code!

Make sure to keep your fork up to date with the main repository, otherwise, you can end up with lots of dreaded merge conflicts. If you prefer working in the browser, these instructions describe how to sync your fork to the original repository via GitHub.

3. Make the changes you’ve discussed

Try to keep the changes focused. If you submit a large amount of work all in one go it will be much more work for whoever is reviewing your pull request. Help them help you. :wink:

While making your changes, commit often and write good, detailed commit messages. This blog explains how to write a good Git commit message and why it matters. It is also perfectly fine to have a lot of commits - including ones that break code. A good rule of thumb is to push up to GitHub when you do have passing tests then the continuous integration (CI) has a good chance of passing everything. 😸

If you feel tempted to “branch out” then please make a new branch and a new issue to go with it. This blog details the different Git branching models.

Please do not re-write history! That is, please do not use the rebase command to edit previous commit messages, combine multiple commits into one, or delete or revert commits that are no longer necessary.

Are you new to Git and GitHub or just want a detailed guide on getting started with version control? Check out our Version Control chapter in The Turing Way Book!

4. Submit a pull request

We encourage you to open a pull request as early in your contributing process as possible. This allows everyone to see what is currently being worked on. It also provides you, the contributor, feedback in real-time from both the community and the continuous integration as you make commits (which will help prevent stuff from breaking).

When you are ready to submit a pull request, you will automatically see the Pull Request Template contents in the pull request body. It asks you to:

By filling out the “Lorem ipsum” sections of the pull request template with as much detail as possible, you will make it really easy for someone to review your contribution!

If you have opened the pull request early and know that its contents are not ready for review or to be merged, add “[WIP]” at the start of the pull request title, which stands for “Work in Progress”. When you are happy with it and are happy for it to be merged into the main repository, change the “[WIP]” in the title of the pull request to “[Ready for review]”.

A member of The Turing Way team will then review your changes to confirm that they can be merged into the main repository. A review will probably consist of a few questions to help clarify the work you’ve done. Keep an eye on your GitHub notifications and be prepared to join in that conversation.

You can update your fork of The Turing Way repository and the pull request will automatically update with those changes. You don’t need to submit a new pull request when you make a change in response to a review.

You can also submit pull requests to other contributors’ branches! Do you see an open pull request that you find interesting and want to contribute to? Simply make your edits on their files and open a pull request to their branch!

What happens if the continuous integration (CI) fails (for example, if the pull request notifies you that “Some checks were not successful”)? The CI could fail for a number of reasons. At the bottom of the pull request, where it says whether your build passed or failed, you can click “Details” next to the test, which takes you to a CI run log site. If you have the write access to the repo, you can view the log or rerun the checks by clicking the “Restart build” button in the top right. You can learn more about CI in the Continuous Integration chapter!

GitHub has a nice introduction to the pull request workflow, but please get in touch if you have any questions :balloon:.

The process of writing chapters

Local development

You can build and host the book website locally. The steps are:

To build book locally

  1. Install the required software to build the book, optionally in a virtual environment:

    pip install -r book/website/requirements.txt

  2. You can now build or refresh the book using:

    cd ./book/website
jupyter-book build .

Style Guide

In The Turing Way’s Community Handbook, we have developed a style guide for the project.

The Turing Way style guide will provide guidance and supporting resources for ensuring consistency, readability and accessibility for all our users.

You are welcome to contribute to the style guide by opening a new issue.

Representing The Turing Way

We would LOVE people to give talks about the project or represent The Turing Way in other ways! We have created a promotion pack for you to reuse. You will find useful details about the project, a list of frequently asked questions, slide decks, and contact details.

If you would like to represent the project in your network, please open an issue and ping aleesteele, malvikasharan and KirstieJane so that they can do their best to support you.

We would appreciate if you could share a short abstract and your presentation by adding them to the conferences folder and some info in the conferences README.md.

Recognising Contributions

We welcome and recognise all kinds of contributions, from fixing small errors, to developing documentation, maintaining the project infrastructure, writing chapters or reviewing existing resources. In the community handbook, you can read how your contributions will be acknowledged and recorded in The Turing Way. The Turing Way follows the all-contributors specifications. The all-contributors bot usage is described here. You can see a list of current contributors here. 😍

To add yourself or someone else as a contributor, comment on the relevant Issue or Pull Request with the following:

@all-contributors please add <username> for <contributions>

You can see the Emoji Key (Contribution Types Reference) for a list of valid <contribution> types and examples of how we’ve run this command in this issue. The bot will then create a Pull Request to add the contributor and reply with the pull request details.

PLEASE NOTE: Only one contributor can be added with the bot at a time! Add each contributor in turn, merge the pull request and delete the branch (all-contributors/add-<username>) before adding another one. Otherwise, you can end up with dreaded merge conflicts. Therefore, please check the open pull requests first to make sure there aren’t any open requests from the bot before adding another.

What happens if you accidentally run the bot before the previous run was merged and you got those pesky merge conflicts? (Don’t feel bad, we have all done it! 🙈) Simply close the pull request and delete the branch (all-contributors/add-<username>). If you are unable to do this for any reason, please let us know on Slack, the Gitter channel or by opening an issue, and The Turing Way team members will be very happy to help!

Finally, don’t forget to add yourself to the list of contributors here!

These Contributing Guidelines have been adapted from the Contributing Guidelines of the BIDS Starter Kit! (License: CC-BY)

The Turing Way
5 Acknowledgement
The Turing Way
Style Guide