If Your Interns Finish Early…

It’s usually best for your students to pick their next task as a team:

• Assign all students to individually find 2-3 issues they might like to work on.
  • For each of these issues, students should also identify potential starting points.
  • We RECOMMEND the issues be in the same repository. Employers tend to view this more positively, plus it’s much easier to get started because they’ve already gotten the dev environment set up. (It’s not required, however.)
• At the next meeting, review the proposals and decide as a team which issue you will tackle. (Or if students prefer, they could work independently.)

We can also find an issue for you, if you’d like. Email us, post in the mentors channel on Slack, or have your interns post in #ask-for-help to request this.

If there isn’t enough time left to find a new issue, or there aren’t very many issues available, you can encourage your interns to make documentation improvements. Some starting points to share:

• Was anything out of date/missing from development environment setup instructions?
• Find a couple pages relevant to the code your interns wrote. Is everything there still accurate? Are there any typos?

This helps dispel two common misconceptions about open source:

• You don’t need “permission” to open a pull request.
• Non-code contributions are valuable and appreciated!