Want to join the Dev Team?
We welcome new developers!
Unfortunately, because of the nature of volunteer projects, there are often times when we see a lot of turn over as new developers join and veteran ones get busy and have less time. There's a learning curve associated with joining the team which involves asking the veteran developers lots of questions, and learning about the dev team's various policies and procedures. This translates into a cost for the current developers to educate new developers and help them come up to speed. Since that takes time from the existing developers, we want to make sure that we're spending it on people who will stay with us for a while and add value.
In order to make that happen, we try to ease new developers into the project. We let them try it out on their own and ask lots of questions. We're fairly hands-off during this period and expect the new developer to be self motivated. We provide support, but we don't expect any kind of commitment. As you demonstrate commitment to us, we'll reciprocate in turn and help you.
New members to the team continue to operate in a restricted mode for a little while. That length of time depends wholly on the developer's ability to learn and follow our procedures. During this time, we ask that new developers don't commit code without getting it reviewed and tested. Even afterwards, many of our experienced developers on the project don't commit without a code review, except for small, well understood changes. Code reviews are good. When new developers reach the point where the code reviews are perfunctory, then they are escalated to a new level where they are given autonomy to make broader changes.
This process is in place to ensure a high quality level for the product. It guarantees that we don't wind up with an influx of new developers who make many conflicting changes, and then depart leaving us with an inferior product and nobody to fix it. We have many users who use L2J-Datapack directly from SVN or nightly builds and their feedback is important to us. These users count on us to maintain a consistent, high quality product at all times. Creating and following appropriate procedures has enabled us to do this successfully.
We expect L2J-Datapack developers to:
- Be willing to put at least xx hours as week into L2J development
- Help out in the L2J-Datapack Forum
- Spend time on the Developers IRC channel to get to know the other team members and accelerate development time.
- Be open to new ideas and willing to discuss them in a non confrontational manner.
Join now!
The Dev-team is not particularly difficult to join but we do ask volunteers to prove themselves before they join. Please take the time to demonstrate your abilities by helping from outside the dev-team until you have some sort of track record. Show us some of your working L2J-Datapack scripts in the contributions forum, talk to us in the forums, come spend time with us in the #l2j or #l2j-datapack IRC channel (irc.freenode.net) and then we may help you get started on the path to joining the team!
