How to Contribute

Quality has highest priority

You are not your code

Read: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ten-commandments-of-egoless-programming/

Write readable code

Developers spend about 25% writing code, but 75% reading it. Writing readable code saves a lot of time.

• Keep the coding style consistent
• Prefer longer, unambiguous names over short but ambiguous ones
• Prefer slower but easily readable code over short/fast but hard to read code (if it doesn't noticeable affect performance)
• Even small things matter; If a character (e.g. whitespace) is superfluous, remove it, if it is missing, add it.

Choose quality over quantity

While quick and dirty implementations may save time in the short run, they will cost more in the long run.

• "Quick and dirty" is almost never an option, there is only "clean and solid"
• Always mark temporary or unfinished solutions using either TODO or FIXME with an explaining comment
  • Use FIXME for code that is wrong or missing
  • Use TODO for code that works, but needs to be improved

Adding features

1. Make sure there is an issue on GitHub or something equivalent
2. Create a new branch for the feature, based on latest develop, e.g. feature/some-keywords

Note: Always include the issue ID in a commit comment, e. g. #23 implemented update task

Writing Migration

We use flywaydb for database migration. If you never heard of database migration please dig into the topic, this this manual will only cover technical details.

Migration scripts

Our migrations can be found here: https://github.com/FAForever/db/tree/develop/migrations

Naming Convention: Vxx__some-keywords.sql

A pull request typically contains one migration. The maintainer may change your filename, mostly the version.

Tipps to get your PR approved

• Nearly every table should have a create_time and update_time column.

 `create_time` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
 `update_time` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,

• Consider adding data for development https://github.com/FAForever/db/blob/develop/test-data.sql
• Be familiar with Database normalization