N ways to participate in Apache's top open source projects, Apache Dubbo Samples SIG is established!

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Is only contributing code considered as participating in an open source project community contribution?

When it comes to contributing to open source projects, everyone's response is generally a code-level contribution. I always feel that my code has been merged by the community, and I am considered a contributor. This is a common misconception. In fact, many roles in an open source community are non-code contributors, and many key responsibilities in an open source community are ignored by everyone.
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Organizing activities can also be contributing to the community:

• You can study like @fzamperin in Cuiaba, Brazil, and organize workshops or offline meetups for your favorite open source projects
• You can also help community members find suitable offline summits to submit technical issues
• ……

Technical writing or technical evangelism also contributes to the community:

• Write or improve documentation for your favorite open source projects
• Create a sample of how to use this open source project
• Translate the document into other languages to help developers around the world know and use the project
• Share the guidelines and experience of using the project on your own official account or blog
• ……

Design and official website development also contribute to the community:

• Refactor the official website of the open source project to help developers better understand and use the open source project
• Conduct user research to better improve website navigation and directory
• Build a style guide to help the project have a more unified and complete visual design
• Design stickers, T-shirts and other peripherals for the open source project
• ……

The Apache Dubbo Samples SIG is established! samples contributors are recruiting

Apache Dubbo has developed to this day, and there are already 386 contributors, including code, testing, use cases, documentation, usage suggestions and other rich content. Currently Dubbo Core has two very active evolution branches, 2.7 and 3.0. Among them, version 2.7 has been put into production on a large scale by many well-known companies, such as Ctrip, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Guazi Second-hand Cars, etc., and the 3.0 branch has also been released in March The preview version has been released, and as planned, the first version 3.0 available in June will also be officially released.
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The rapid evolution and iteration of the kernel has promoted the rapid development of Dubbo. At the same time, it has also brought new challenges to the entire community and the Committer core project team. This is reflected in:
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• New Feature related user examples and documents are missing . Users don't know how to use the new version's features, and flipping through the code becomes the only way.
• stability cannot be fully guaranteed . In the iterative process, unit testing and integration testing have not been effectively supplemented, which leads to a decline in test coverage and an increase in regression costs. What is worse is that if some problems in the release link are still undiscovered, they will be inevitable Was taken to the user's use link.

Due to the lack of documentation and use cases, we have to deal with a large number of issues, including other online Q&A, to answer users’ questions. Some of them are because users don’t know how to use a specific function, and some are not used. The correct configuration method can cause normal operation; the decrease in stability is a double blow to both ourselves and Dubbo users. Continued problems will cause users to lose confidence in the release of Dubbo's version, and to us core maintainers. In other words, the version that took a lot of effort to complete has brought confusion to users, which will make the entire development team frustrated. Undoubtedly, for the Dubbo community, solving the above problems has become an urgent task at present. This in itself is no less important than the core function development that everyone is passionate about, but we also realize that it takes a certain amount of money to invest in it. The energy of the current maintainers alone will be very difficult, especially considering that they also need to take care of the operation of the entire Dubbo community.
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In this context, we thought of convening forces from the community. Today, with the unanimous suggestion of Committer’s core members, Apache Dubbo decided to establish the Samples SIG (Note: SIG is the abbreviation of special interest group, that is, interest group), in order to improve The above examples are missing, stability and other issues. There is no doubt that the operation of this SIG requires the active participation of developers. Of course, the core developers of the community will also be actively active in it.

Dubbo status

Of course, to stably support the stable operation of so many enterprises and instances, Dubbo's testing and stability mechanisms are not useless. The following are some of the capabilities and operating mechanisms that Dubbo possesses.
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• unit test . The unit tests are all located at _ https://github.com/apache/dubbo_ backbone warehouse , currently it can reach a coverage of about 40%-50%, but unfortunately there are many new changes recently, including 2.7 and 3.0 In this regard, everything is lacking.
• integration test . Dubbo's integration test project is located at _ https://github.com/apache/dubbo-samples_ , which contains most of the Dubbo Feature use cases we are currently building. You can use it as a Quick Start sample project, or you can As a functional reference manual (code), we built an automated integration test mechanism on it, which can achieve full verification of all use cases.
• based on the automated testing process based on Github Actions. Every code submission and PR will trigger this Workflow, which will compile the main warehouse, and run unit tests and integration tests in turn, as well as some code compliance checks.

The improvement plan we have to do is to continue to improve on the basis of the above existing components. Through combing, we concluded that the following parts need to be focused on improvement:
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• Unit test coverage of some core mechanisms and components newly introduced in Dubbo 3.0
• User use cases and integration tests of some core components newly introduced in Dubbo 3.0
• Dubbo's key components, such as Zookeeper, Nacos, etc.
• Unit test coverage of some core components of Dubbo kernel, such as Registry, Directory, URL, FilterBuilder, Context, AsyncRpcResult, ApplicationModel, ServiceRepository, etc.

Please pay attention to the SIG contact information below to achieve better continuous collaboration and task progress updates.

Help and requirements for participants

Participate in SIG, whether you are a student, a developer or user of Dubbo beginners, or a technology expert in the workplace, here should be able to bring you some help:
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• Master how to use Dubbo's new features
• Quickly understand Dubbo's core working mechanism
• Grasp first-hand information on the evolution of Dubbo
• If you are an enterprise user, you can also jointly promote the stability of Dubbo and solve the problem of Dubbo's enterprise landing
• In-depth communication with technical experts and peers in the industry to improve yourself and realize information sharing
• Accumulate activity, become an open source expert, get connected with Apache and have the opportunity to become Apache Dubbo Committer

In addition, the community will also hold online and offline activities from time to time to obtain exclusive gifts for community contributors.
Our only requirement for participants is enthusiasm. We hope that participants can continue to invest in the construction of the Dubbo community and regularly participate in our SIG exchange activities to achieve collaboration with others.

reference document :

• https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/