Spot on, I've seen plenty of great looking projects that I could contribute to but have next to no onboarding or set-up process. I'm keen on helping out but I'm not going to spend days setting things up locally because the primary project managers CBF to simplify the process.

Minimizing the mental overhead to get started should be something these larger projects strive for, especially if they're struggling to get devs.

Even something like having a docker container for web apps is massively helpful, being able to up a container and everything just works means more tech adjacent contributors can join the project (designers, UI/UX experts, testers etc)

[–] NightAuthor@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I absolutely loved how easy it was to setup the HomeAssistant dev environment.

But on the other hand, I realized shortly thereafter that the changes k wanted to make had already been implemented by someone else, but were having a hard time getting them merged in… over the past 3 years.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I forgot to mention Mumble as an example. It was many years ago, so hopefully things have improved by now, but the dependencies and setup for that were insane. I felt like I'd made a mess of my primary OS by the time I was done.