You too can contribute to AngularJS

You might have shrugged, and taken a few steps back to sit down and process this. Me? Contributing to AngularJS? there are probably more professional people than me to do it.

Wrong.

I could’ve replaced AngularJS with React, the Linux kernel, and Docker repositories and you would still be thinking the same.
Why is that?

It’s because you are thinking in terms of code. You are awe’ed by the size of the project.

You automatically assume that you can only contribute code, and that piece of PR must be perfect, and one that will rock the world of AngularJS people.

Wrong again.

Making the world better for other developers

I was busy one day with an issue related to AngularJS filters.
Do you know which built-in filters are available with Angular?

That’s right. I didn’t know either.

So I quickly found myself skimming through Angular’s developer guide for filters, and annoyingly, finding no reference there.
It looked somewhat like this:

Nothing too helpful there. Right? I thought the same.

It took me a few more minutes to find the right documentation page which lists all the built-in filters, but why on earth would I need to search for that when I’m already on the filters section?

One developer’s itch, is another repository’s Pull-Request

Obviously AngularJS team manages their documentation on GitHub I immediately thought to myself. And they do.

So it’s pretty automatic for me these days but it’s basically all about:

Open a PR
Submit the Markdown changes to update the text with a link to the proper page
Debate this with the AngularJS team to align text.

Boom bam, thank you ma’am — merged like a boss.

Next time you read the filters documentation at https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/filter you can thank me for the reference to built-in filters.

You’re welcome.