Zulip is a proud participant in Outreachy and is currently helping new open source contributors apply to be Outreachy interns for the upcoming December 2017 round. We'll teach you and pay you to improve Zulip, full-time, between December 5, 2017 and March 5, 2018.
If you're in a group underrepresented in open source communities and you're interested in contributing to Zulip during a paid apprenticeship, please apply by the October deadline!
Zulip is a powerful, open source group chat application. Zulip's key feature is topic-based threading, which allows for long running, high quality chat conversations, and makes it possible for distributed teams to communicate effectively over chat. Zulip is the leading open source competitor to Slack, by community size and by commit velocity.
As an organization, we value high-quality mentorship and high-quality product -- you can expect to learn a lot from disciplined code reviews by highly experienced engineers. Since Zulip is a group chat product, your Outreachy experience with the Zulip project will be highly interactive, with a focus on teaching you the concepts and reasoning behind how Zulip is engineered and how to make it better. All three of our Outreachy interns from the 2016 cycle are now core contributors to the Zulip project.
Zulip is written in Python, and uses the Django framework. The web frontend is mostly in jQuery, the mobile app is written in React Native, and our desktop apps use Electron.
We have an easy-to-setup development environment, and a library of tasks that are great for first-time contributors. Also take a look at our architectural overview and key concepts.
We'd love for you to drop by our open Zulip livechat at chat.zulip.org (we use Zulip instead of IRC), and introduce yourself; compose a new stream message to the 'Outreachy 2017-2018' stream, with your name as the topic, and a few sentences about your background and interests.
Our Outreachy application process opens mid-September and closes mid-October. You'll follow the instructions here.
Your application should include the following:
- Details on any experience you have related to the technologies that Zulip has, or related to our product approach.
- Links to materials to help us evaluate your level of experience and how you work, such as personal projects of yours, including any existing open source or open culture contributions you've made and any bug reports you've submitted to open source projects.
- Some notes on what you are hoping to get out of your twelve-week project.
- A short description of the area you'd like to work on, and why you're interested in it.
- A link to the initial contribution(s) you did.
If you're applying for a coding internship: We expect applicants to either have experience with the technologies relevant to their project or have strong programming experience. We also expect applicants to be excited about learning how to do disciplined, professional software engineering, where they can demonstrate through reasoning and automated tests that their code is correct.
If you're applying for a writing internship: We expect applicants to be skilled in writing in English for a non-academic audience, and to be interested in getting feedback that will help them write accurately and accessibly about technology.
As the application process guide says:
"While only one contribution is required to be considered for the program, we find that the strongest applicants make multiple contributions throughout the application process, including after the application deadline."
We are more interested in candidates if we see them submitting good contributions to Zulip projects, helping other applicants on GitHub and on chat.zulip.org, learning from our suggestions, trying to solve their own obstacles and then asking well-formed questions, and making good observations about how the product can be improved.
Also, you're going to find that people give you links to pages that answer your questions. Here's how that often works:
- you try to solve your problem until you get stuck, including looking through our code and our documentation, then start formulating your request for help
- you ask your question
- someone directs you to a document
- you go read that document, and try to use it to answer your question
- you find you are confused about a new thing
- you ask another question
- now that you have demonstrated that you have the ability to read, think, and learn new things, someone has a longer talk with you to answer your new specific question
- you and the other person collaborate to improve the document that you read in step 3 :-)
This helps us make a balance between person-to-person discussion and documentation that everyone can read, so we save time answering common questions but also get everyone the personal help they need. This will help you understand the rhythm of help we provide in the developers' Zulip livechat -- including why we prefer to give you help in public mailing lists and Zulip streams, instead of in one-on-one private messages or email. We prefer to hear from you and respond to you in public places so more people have a chance to answer the question, and to see and benefit from the answer.
We're interested in a variety of coding and writing projects you could do with our web app's back end and front end, our mobile or desktop apps, or other code that integrates with Zulip.
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Writing bots and integrations -- e.g., a better IRC mirror or Jabber mirror or Mailman integration.
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Making it easier to import data from Slack into Zulip.
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Working on engineering for our React Native mobile app for iOS. This is a pressing need for us, since our current iOS app is very out of date.
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Lots of projects on the core Zulip server and web frontend. The backend is written in Python and uses the Django framework, and the frontend is written in vanilla jQuery/javascript.
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Merging some of our Django extensions into upstream -- Zulip has several cool extensions and/or monkey-patchings we do to improve the Django web framework for our users, and several of these would make sense to attempt to contribute to upstream Django (or at least make into reusable Django extension(s)). These include:
- Zulip's cool request parsing library (
zerver/lib/request.py) JsonableErrorexception middleware- Time-tracking of database and memcached profiling data and including in logs, and adding support for doing the same with time spent rendering templates (may be worth looking at https://github.com/dropbox/stopwatch as a potential replacement)
- Zulip’s caching extensions (
zerver/lib/cache*.py)
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Improving our Electron-based desktop client application with better design, notifications, and cooler desktop integrations.
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Writing more development tutorials, and especially testing/documenting/expanding the Zulip API bindings -- we'd probably want to go for an approach that involves auto-generated documentation.
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Writing technical blog posts for the Zulip blog, like this one.
Check out our bite-sized bugs. If none of those work for you, drop in on our open livechat and compose a new stream message to the 'Outreachy 2017-2018' stream with your name as the topic, and talk with us about your current experience -- we'll find something for you.
Our mentors will include Tim Abbott and Rishi Gupta, both of whom work on maintaining Zulip full time, and both of whom you can ping in our Zulip livechat.
Hope to hear from you!