The focus of Scala Sprees is to help newcomers and veterans alike participate in open source! Come meet contributors of well-known open source Scala projects and learn how you can make your own contribution.

The next spree is planned for February 2024 in Nantes, France.

Your challenge? Get one pull request merged into one of the projects, and get this awesome t-shirt:

We'd like to thank ScalaIO crew for hosting the event!

If you are a maintainer of an OSS project and would like to mentor someone during the Spree on your project, please fill in the form, indicating that you would like to be a mentor.

At the beginning, maintainers gather together in front of all the contributors to briefly explain their projects and tickets in one minute. The idea is to give a good high-level explanation to motivate participants without going into too much detail. A link to this page is provided.

When they are done, participants approach the projects they are most interested in and speak with the maintainers. Maintainers can listen to the participants' experience and provide guidance on what tickets would suit them.

Then, the fun begins! Participants start hacking on their projects and maintainers review PRs as they come, assisting participants when they ask for help. We encourage maintainers to merge as many PRs on the spot if possible, for two reasons:

1. Participants get a small token of appreciation from the Scala Center.
2. It increases the motivation of the participants.

If a participant gets their first PR merged, they are invited to continue solving issues until they are happy with their work!

At the middle of the spree, the Scala Center and sponsors of the event provide maintainers and participants alike with some refreshment (drinks, sandwiches, pizza, etc).

Participants can leave the event at any time they want. When the time approaches the end, everyone starts to wrap up: participants finish their PRs while maintainers finish their review, and organizers of the spree give away Scala t-shirts. We finish by thanking your hard work for open-source.

A Scala Center spree is the perfect event to gauge interest in your open-source projects. You not only have the opportunity to get new contributors involved in your project, but you can make friends and co-maintainers that help you make a difference in the open-source world.

There is only one requirement to submit a project -- you need to be present for the duration of the Scala Center spree. Your physical presence is important to assist and motivate contributors.

If you are a maintainer of an open-source Scala project, fill in the registration form and we will get in touch with you.

Create a PR with the following information:

• Project information.
• Your contact details.
• A link to a "spree" or "hackathon" label with curated tickets for the participants. See this project for inspiration.

It's important that the curated tickets are entry-level, typical issues that you would solve in 15-20 minutes of your time as an experienced maintainer. In our experience, newcomers will take 1 to 2 hours to address them, assuming they are unfamiliar with the codebase and this is their first contribution.

Maintainers can make a difference by tweaking some knobs:

• Provide a CONTRIBUTING guide. Contributing guides explain to newcomers the usual workflow to get started and what's expected from them. Good guides: scala/scala, sbt/zinc, scalameta/scalameta, scalacenter/scalafix.
• Provide a motivating README with clear instructions. Make sure docs are up to date.
• Link to documentation when possible, or show contributors how to search for docs. You can label as docs any issue or PR with relevant discussions to get acquainted with implementation details and design decisions.
• Be nice to newcomers, they will always remember it!

Curating tickets is not easy. If you want to optimize for the highest number of contributors, we recommend you to:

• Give hints on potential solutions. Say which solutions are not on the table, if any.
• Describe the purpose of the ticket and its context. Having a clear idea of why your ticket is relevant will motivate participants.
• Add links to source code sparingly. Show the entry-points for the requested functionality / fix, give a basic explanation of the code structure.
• Be concise and detail specifics of your project or its implementation. Providing this kind of domain knowledge to participants will help them finish off their tickets sooner, and move to the next one!