Announcement blog post

[patak-dev]

Issue to track the announcement blog post. We need first:

• Setup blog #176

Some draft initial outline to get the ball rolling:

• CTA to try it out and join the community, follow us in social
• Pre-history and related projects
• Repo and community stats
• Main browsing features
• Admin, Connector
• CTA to join us with a list of nice to have, links to issues for people to jump in

[whitep4nth3r]

I'd like to write a blog post about how to get involved in open source for beginners and use the nmpx project and community as a stellar example of how good things can be.

The blog post outline will be something along the lines of:

Open source can be scary but it doesn't have to be. It's also great for your portfolio and making friends and building a network etc etc.

Here's a guide for complete beginners to open source:

• find a cool project
• check out the community guidelines and check you're happy with agreeing in order to participate
• have a look through closed PRs to see how the maintainers conduct themselves and if it makes you feel good about getting involved
• check the contributors list to see how active and diverse the project is, it's a good sign if there are many contributors with a good breadth of immediate visual diversity
• take a look at the issues, find labels eg good first issue or areas of your expertise
• find a contributing guide to help you get set up (if you get stuck, this is also a good opportunity to make a PR, I often do this)
• want some help or want to chat things through? There's probably a discord! Go and check out the vibe.
• if there's an open issue, you can just open a PR without needing to ask to be assigned, the maintainers will be grateful! Even if your PR is superseded by another one, the maintainers may even merge it, as they did with one of mine over at npmx!
• not all PRs need open issues, if you find something interesting to fix or add, you can propose it with a PR directly

All of these bullet points will highlight my experience with npmx so far, as it's quite surreal how in just 24 hours I was able to cover all of those points!

---

Now, given that there will be an official npmx announcement, I discussed with @patak-dev that it could be interesting to time the launch of the official blog post with mine, so we could link to each other to get some SEO juice flowing early.

And then we thought, what if we coordinated a mass blog posting effort from contributors who could all be linked to from the official announcement post?

This would also show how active and actively diverse the project is from the get go, hopefully reaching many more people than just a single post, given the unique perspectives to be offered from a variety of people.

After discussions, we're thinking the official announcement post will go live on March 1st.

If you'd like to get involved by writing a blog post to complement the launch, add a comment to this discussion. Ideally, you will have contributed in some form to npmx to be able to offer your perspective of participating in the project and community (not just code!).

[whitep4nth3r]

There is now a dedicated channel in the npmx discord to hold additional discussions.

https://discord.com/channels/1464542801676206113/1467446623620825120

[stephfh]

Good idea to get people with blogs to write about it as well, in similar vain as you're planning to. I'd offer my blog as well, but I don't have one – maybe I should 😅, but if you need a pre read for the official post as well hit me up.

A note on blog posts outlining »getting started in open source«:
I'd emphasise to find a project you care about not just “any cool project“ (yes, yes, npmx is cool, ok?!), we don't need to add more slop to maintainers' plates by telling people “get up and get sending PRs“ (there's enough of those already).

If you care about something you tend to stick to it longer and don't just hop in and send PRs for your 5 minutes of fame and instead will find other ways to get involved with a project as well. Which is essentially what you want to achieve, you want to grow a community around the project.
Especially as a developer, you have got way more opportunity to get involved: Read others PRs, help review and testing them, start discussions (where applicable), ...

Which is, essentially, what made npmx escalate to its current state as quickly as it did: We saw the issues with npm and wanted to fix them, so we got together.

[jonathanyeong]

Keen for this! Not sure how much I can do for numbers or SEO juice. But it will at least give me a way to process how fun and special contributing to this project was.

[abbeyperini]

I can get something done by March 1st

[whitep4nth3r]

Here's a draft I put together for my post highlighting the good stuff going on.

https://preview--mk2-p4nth3rblog.netlify.app/blog/how-to-make-your-first-open-source-contribution/

[patak-dev]

About who could join the alpha launch web ring, I was thinking that on top of the main blog posts from y'all maybe we could extend the invitation to anyone in the community that has a blog (or that would want to start one with this post as a trigger). It could be as simple as "write about what you experienced during the month leading to the launch". We could get somehow links to all the drafts to vet them and then also include all of them in the launch blog post. I think this could be a good showcase of how wide is the npmx community. What do you think?

[TheAlexLichter]

Happy to contribute too with a post from the "VoidZero lense" of things (covering how the tooling used for npmx improves DX, speeds up development, and so on)!

(Topic still tba and can change if there is a better angle)

---

Also could cover the technical aspect / rundown in a video 🤔

[abbeyperini]

I love the idea, @patak-dev ! I've been in communities where there was a writing monthly challenge, and it really helps the newbies. We could announce a writing prompt (or a prompt for any kind of content to @TheAlexLichter 's point!) and a place to submit it. When they submit, they could indicate if they want feedback or mentorship.

[whitep4nth3r]

I think this is a great idea @patak-dev.

The issues I can foresee are:

1. Not everyone will be able to make draft posts available for review for inclusion
2. A coordinated publishing event of many blogs at once in time to include them in the alpha release blog post might be tricky, unless all posts are published before the alpha release, in which case it might spoil the announcement 😅 (this is one of the reasons I wrote up my draft post now, so I'd have a URL ready for inclusion in the announcement post when it's written up, even if it's not live on my production site)

To this end, perhaps instead of including all blog posts as links in the actual release announcement copy, we have a space below the blog post to include links to other related posts, which means we can add them to the release post as and when they are published and/or submitted. I can't think of a good title for the section right now but something like More from the npmx community.

We could have a "window" to submit blog posts on the topic of the month leading up to the launch of maybe 5 days, after which that type of post will no longer be relevant and we can move on to a different topic in the same way and encourage different types of contributions.

[abbeyperini]

🤔 Then our current call for blogs is probably sufficient for this month, and we can create a process for blogs and mentorship for future releases after March 3rd?

For reference, here's the format of the writing challenge VC does. They're only collecting word count, blog link, and author in the form, and those are automatically added to the summary page.