We dipped our collective toes in the GitHub waters when we open-sourced our embeddable comments script last year. We’ve got much bigger things underway now: we’re open-sourcing the code that powers alistapart.com.

Contributing to an open-source project can be tough, and it can take time to get the hang of things. We want to help with that. If you’re inexperienced with GitHub, our goal is to provide you with a great place to send your first-ever pull requests—to help you get comfortable contributing to a large open-source effort, participating in issue threads, and reviewing code.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to be ramping things up around here. We’re currently using ExpressionEngine, which makes it tricky to clone the repo and run the site locally—at least, with this first incarnation of the repo. We’re exploring ways to make that better.

For right now, we’d love to have your eyes on our dev site, which directly mirrors our dev branch. Don’t hesitate to file a new issue or join us in the issue tracker if anything catches your eye.

By joining our conversations as we weigh the pros and cons of certain approaches, you’ll be better armed to make the same decisions on your own projects. If you’re already well-versed in the ways of GitHub we’d love to have your eyes on how we’ll be doing things over the next few weeks, and your help building a welcoming, low-pressure place to learn the ins and outs of contributing to an open source project.