The Self-Help Guide to Start Contributing to a Repo (the most ideal one):

1. Email one of the active contributors or leaders.. but i knocked their door..

2. Set a time where we can meet to discuss what to contribute and how, in this case, I have solved the "What" because Moon clearly states that there is a TODO list for noc-2-mewnala-port

3. Get involved in the discord community if possible (e.g, processing -> #libprocessing). Moon kindly introduced me to Raphael and Charlotte who are the other active maintainers/contributors.

Raphael suggests to read this README.md for processing-examples-mewnala. I realized maybe my contribution would have been a little faster if the examples in that repository is done first. But no hurt in trying out in parallel! I think all the parallel discussion in the Discord still helps to flag the maintainer of what is working or not working, and it kinda bonds us lol.

By being in a discussion group, we can check if our current issue is already flagged by other member, and i'm pretty lucky that others are active enough to see my issue and reply with their own similar issue.

I also found it more responsive on discord rather than on Issues

4. Creating pull requests separately for each chapter for clarity, conflict avoidance, organization sake:

- chapter0

- chapter1

Current status:

Not merged yet as there are still some syntax/aliases that are not ported yet in `mewnala 0.0.3` although Charlotte mentions that it should be included in `0.0.4`. That version is still not deployed yet though.

Last minute running into @shiffman's feedback on both of my PR before final.... ;-;

First time replying to comment and merging their suggestion (my first time seeing this feature, and I think it is quiet similar to real human group work in real life but github materializes a lot of our team workflow into terms and buttons)...

I have to make sure I'm not going too fast while reading the suggestion to not commit a mistake on my end.

There's no one else in the Pull Request room... it's just me, and few guest stars (@shiffman & @catilac)

Few takeaways that I got from this first ever contribution:

1. A lot of detective work on related repositories that may or may not be the actual repository that we're contributing to. For example, the repository i'm working on was forked from `noc-2-processing-port` and the maintainer hasn't enable any Issues tab. Some syntaxes usage are resolved by going through the searchbar within `libprocessing` but there are still a lot of other syntaxes that are unported.

2. Which leads us to the next lesson about contributing to open source: listening and finding resource from others through discord or email or meeting to check if things have been updated or if there is any workaround, name conventions that I should know of. In general for pull request, there is no specific title management, but I discussed with Moon that it should be per chapter to be organized, clarity and avoid conflicts.

3. It is a good space to learn new programming language! Moon asks if I'm interested to learn Rust and also joked about us not being familiar with Python and has to change the Processing Java / p5js JS mindset into Python syntaxes.

4. Learnt to be more patient and hold back from making a PR before fully sure and checking with others. Though I agree with committing frequently to my personal branch to avoid losing any progress.