Hello there! First of all, thanks for being interested in roots and helping out. We all think you are awesome, and by contributing to open source projects, you are making the world a better place. That being said, there are a few ways to make the process of contributing code to roots smoother, detailed below:
If you are opening an issue about a bug, make sure that you include clear steps for how we can reproduce the problem. If we can't reproduce it, we can't fix it. If you are suggesting a feature, make sure your explanation is clear and detailed.
Roots is constantly evolving, and to ensure that things are secure and working for everyone, we need to have tests. If you are adding a new feature, please make sure to add a test for it.
Our own tests are not yet complete either, and we have had a tough time figuring out how to test things like the watch process and deployers. This is a constant work in progress for us, and it will be steadily improving over time.
To keep a consistant coding style in the project, we're going with Felix's Node.js Style Guide for JS and Polar Mobile's guide for CoffeeScript, but it should be noted that much of this project uses under_scores rather than camelCase for naming. Both of these are pretty standard guides. For documenting in the code, we're using JSDoc.
Our .editorconfig file will help inforce some of these standards. You can download a plugin for your editor of choice here.
It's ok if you start out with a bunch of experimentation and your commit log isn't totally clean, but before any pull requests are accepted, we like to have a nice clean commit log. That means well-written and clear commit messages and commits that each do something significant, rather than being typo or bug fixes.
If you submit a pull request that doesn't have a clean commit log, we will ask you to clean it up before we accept. This means being familiar with rebasing - if you are not, this guide by github should help you to get started, and feel free to ask us anything, we are happy to help.