GitHub issue finder

Overview

Idea for a long(ish)-term collaborative project for CCFP members to contribute to.

I've spent the last few months in an extended coding bootcamp, and wanted to share some skills that I would not have been able to develop by self-teaching alone, namely:

1. How to use Git effectively
2. How to pair-program effectively
3. How to debug someone else's code
4. Generally how to collaborate with others in a shared codebase

The concept for the app is somewhat "meta": an issue-finder that will query GitHub for beginner-friendly issues that would be a good starting point for contributing to open-source software. A rough idea of the UI would be a subset of GitHub's Advanced Search that is specifically optimized for issue queries (and can suggest beginner-related issue labels, etc.)

I would like to leverage a functional programming approach as much as possible, while staying reasonably within the bounds of everyone's wheelhouse. It could also be an opportunity to "level up" and learn some emerging tech (e.g., since we'd be using GitHub API's, this could be a good for getting familiar with GraphQL).

Proposed timeline

This is pretty rough and off-the-top-of-my-head, but a rough order of events might look something like:

1. Draft project specification/user stories I roughly have something in mind, so would be happy to self-assign this.
2. Design specification Also happy to put something together in XD/Sketch, it could just be a single view to start
3. Decide on tech stack Since most are familiar with React, that seems like a reasonable framework for frontend. Other considerations:
   1. Utility libraries I'd push for something in the spirit of lodash/fp, partial.lenses or ramda to maintain the functional-inspired approach 🙂, but it would also be good practice to implement as many utility functions from scratch as possible
   2. State management I'd recommend Redux (or Redux-style use of React hooks)
   3. Testing
   4. Styling
   5. Data-fetching If using GraphQL, react-apollo is very nice to work with
   6. Deployment Zeit's now seems nice?
4. DevOps Set up CircleCI, go over Git workflow, test deployment
5. Proof-of-concept Frontend only
6. ?

GitHub GraphQL API

I'd recommend we all spend some time exploring the GitHub GraphQL API to get an understanding of the sort of queries that we're able to construct: https://developer.github.com/v4/explorer/. For example, this is a good starting point for a basic query that finds issues tagged good first issue:

query { 
  search(query:"label:\"good first issue\"", first:10, type:ISSUE) {
    edges {
      node {
        ... on Issue {
          repository {
            owner {
              login
            }
            updatedAt
          }
          updatedAt
          title
          labels(first:10) {
            nodes {
              name
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}