Finding good first issues 🔎#

You have successfully built the Arrow library; congrats!

The next step is finding something to work on. As mentioned before, you might already have a bug to fix in mind, or a new feature that you want to implement. Or you still need an issue to work on and you need some help with finding one.

For both cases, GitHub is the issue tracker that we use.

When the ticket is created you can start a discussion about it in the GitHub comments.

GitHub labels#

To make it easier for you to find issues that are well-suited for new contributors, we have added a label “good-first-issue” to some GitHub issues.

See also

Search for good first issues good-first-issue label listing

The issues labeled as good first issues should take no more than two days or a weekend to fix them. Once you dig into the code you may find that the issue is not easy at all - this can happen as the problem could be harder than the person who triaged the ticket expected it to be. Don’t hesitate to write that in the comments.

Note

When you find a GitHub issue you would like to work on, please mention your interest in the comment section of that issue; that way we will know you are working on it. Consider assigning yourself to the issue (Issue assignment) when the work starts.

Also, do not hesitate to ask questions in the comment. You can get some pointers about where to start and similar issues already solved.

What if an issue is already assigned? When in doubt, comment on the issue asking if they mind if you try to put together a pull request; interpret no response to mean that you’re free to proceed.

Ask questions Please do ask questions, either on the GitHub issue itself or on the dev mailing list, if you have doubts about where to begin or what approach to take. This is particularly a good idea if this is your first code contribution, so you can get some sense of what the core developers in this part of the project think a good solution looks like. For best results, ask specific, direct questions, such as:

  • Do you think $PROPOSED_APPROACH is the right one?

  • In which file(s) should I be looking to make changes?

  • Is there anything related in the codebase I can look at to learn?

If you ask these questions and do not get an answer, it is OK to ask again.

Note

Do not forget to create a new branch once you have created or chosen an issue you will be working on! Follow the instructions in the Lifecycle of a pull request section or follow the next section: Working on the Arrow codebase 🧐.