Want to get involved with ROS 2? Come to Waffle

ROS ROS General
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One of the most common questions we get is some version of “how do I start contributing?”
Here is a concrete answer: join us for Waffle, Thursdays, 30 minutes.

What it is

Waffle is a weekly triage meeting. We go through the issues and pull requests coming into the ROS 2 repositories that nobody has picked up yet, and we quickly discuss, triage, and assign them.

It moves fast. Most items get a minute or two: what is this, is it valid, who should look at it. We assign things live in the meeting rather than writing them down for later. In half an hour we get through a lot.

Why it’s a good on-ramp

(via easily digestible bullets!)

  • No preparation. Show up, look at the queue with us.
  • No commitment. Come once, come when you can, leave early if you need to.
  • You don’t need to be a committer. Anyone is welcome.
  • You’ll see how the project actually works. Half an hour of watching maintainers make real decisions about real code teaches you more about the project than a lot of reading.
  • It’s a good way to find something to work on. Plenty of what crosses the queue is well-scoped and looking for someone. That someone could be you.

If you already know one corner of the stack well, you are especially useful. Being able to glance at an incoming PR and say “this looks fine” or “this will break X” is exactly the thing we never have enough of.

One thing it isn’t

Waffle is not the place to bring your own issue or pull request. We work through the queue in order, and carving out time for individual requests is what turns a 30 minute meeting into a 90 minute one. If you need eyes on something specific, Discourse or Zulip is the right venue.

Details

Just turn up. We’re glad to have you.

Why “Waffle”? The meeting is named after waffle.io, the GitHub-backed kanban board we used to run triage on years ago. The service is long dead, the name stuck. The board we use now is generated by Baffle Maker, built by @andrew_symington, which is a Bazel waffle board, and also a baffle is the partition you put in a duct to control the flow of what’s coming through it. Make of that what you will. It is a large part of why this meeting runs as well as it does now.

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