If You're Reading This, Contribute to Forem

(I hope you enjoyed the title. It's a reference to Canadian Rapper Drake's 2015 mixtape: If You're Reading This, It's Too Late.)

Happy Hacktober! 'Tis the season to contribute. If you're excited about contributing to open source, but you're not sure which project you should contribute to, we'll be posting about tips, tricks, and extraordinary projects looking for contributors all month long.

Are you:

• Looking to contribute to an open source project this Hacktober?
• Reading this article on DEV, which Forem powers?
• Passionate about fostering developer communities?
• Interested in one day building your own community?

If any of the above sounds like you, I suggest considering contributing to Forem.

What is Forem?

CEO Ben Halpern describes Forem as an "Open source software for building communities. Communities for your peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends, and any other time and space where people need to come together to be part of a collective." Community builders can use Forem to create their own independent web application equipped with standalone databases, authentication mechanisms, configuration, dedicated URL, and more. Basically, with Forem, community builders can create and scale a community with all the same features as DEV, and community members can more easily keep up with content.

Communities powered by Forem

I'm currently active on Code Newbie Community, Devocate, and Dev -- all built with Forem. Here's a list of community platforms built by Forem:

• Code Newbie Community
• Dev
• The Relicans
• Fashion Page Community
• This MMA Life
• The Elastic Guru
• Web Monetization Community
• Snyk Community
• COSS Community
• The Community Club
• Devocate
• Crypto Punk
• Flow State
• 1Vibe
• Hometechnica Community
• VS Code Tips
• Forem.dev

You can learn more about each of these communities here.

How it's made

On the backend, Forem is leveraging Ruby on Rails. On the frontend, the Forem team is transitioning to a Preact-first frontend. And if there are any SQL fans out there, like me, Forem uses PostgreSQL for its database.

How to contribute

You probably benefit from Forem in some way, so why not contribute?

If Forem has piqued your interest, take a look at the repository and Contributing.md. Currently, the repo has approximately 415 open issues, so get started and pick up an issue today!

Reminder: This Hacktoberfest, you can receive swag (or have a tree planted in your name) as a reward for making pull requests to projects participating in Hacktoberfest. Hint: Forem is participating in Hacktoberfest and is welcoming contributions.

I'm nervous about contributing because I'm not familiar with the technologies!

Don't be nervous. The contributors and maintainers are friendly and excited to help you learn. The Forem team ensures the community abides by its Code of Conduct.

You can learn and still make a significant impact by contributing to the documentation. The full contributing guidelines exist here.

The cool thing about contributing to open source is that you can use the experience as an opportunity to learn and get familiar with new technologies, so it's okay if you don't know Preact! This is your chance to learn it.

If you want to learn more about Forem, check out our Open Source Friday stream featuring Forem's Co-CEO Ben Halpern and GitHub's Director of Developer Advocacy, Brian Douglas.