Lightgbm: Hacktoberfest Issues + "good first issue" issues

[jameslamb]

Summary

Hacktoberfest 2020 starts in a few weeks (https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/). This is an annual event where GitHub and DigitalOcean promise to send people shirts and stickers if they make 5 pull requests into open source projects.

On other project's I've worked on, I have had a really good experience with contributors coming in during this time to fix small issues.

These can be things like:

• fixing typos or ambiguities in documentation
• reducing duplication in documentation
• writing unit tests
• cutting the size of Docker containers by refactoring Dockerfiles

maintainers: Can you please think about issues which could be attractive to contributors who are not very familiar with LightGBM, and which are fairly small and self-contained? If you think of such issues, tag them with good first issue and the new hacktoberfest label I just created.

For an example, see #3352 that I just created. I'm planning to create more for the R package this weekend.

During October, GitHub will have a special page where they aggregate labels tagged hacktoberfest. The site https://goodfirstissues.com/ does this year-round for issues tagged good first issue. Both of these can be an effective way to get more outside contributors to come and work on LightGBM, reducing the maintenance burden for maintainers.

References

• https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/
• https://goodfirstissues.com/

[guolinke]

I think we can revise the feature request hub, and label some of them.

[jameslamb]

for these aggregators, it's important that each individual issue has the good first issue and hacktoberfest labels. So a section in #2302 titled "Good First Issue" wouldn't work.

[guolinke]

@jameslamb BTW, do the labeled issues need to be open? since most feature request issues are closed.

[jameslamb]

yes, they need to be open

[hcho3]

FYI Hacktoberfest now switched to opt-in, as of October 3: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update. You should add hacktoberfest topic to the repository to opt in. Example:

cc @jameslamb

[jameslamb]

thank you! I juuuuust saw https://github.com/digitalocean/hacktoberfest/pull/596 on Twitter

I just added the hacktoberfest label to the repo

[jameslamb]

commenting in case any possible contributors have subscribed to this issue...I've added a new "good first issue" for the R package: #3471