Join the Mattermost Desktop App Contributor Event

Welcome to the new year, and a new opportunity to get involved in the Mattermost community!

• What: Mattermost is hosting a contributor event to get new and returning contributors to help make improvements to the Mattermost desktop app.
• Why: Help us build E2E tests, or make other improvements and earn a limited-edition mug.
• When: All PRs made before Feb. 4, 2022 will be eligible for this event.
• Where: Everything takes place on the Mattermost desktop app repo.

We’ll also select a small number of top contributors from this event who will receive a set of branded Apple AirPods Pro as a token of our appreciation. We’ll select winners based on the quality of their contributions, how well they follow our community standards and guidelines, and the number of contributions they make.

How to Get Involved

The Desktop app is built on Electron, so you’ll need to be capable of working in JavaScript; the Desktop App Contribution Guide has all the information you need to set up your local development environment. If you’ve never made a contribution to Mattermost before, we also recommend you review the Code Contribution Guide to learn more about the structure of the Mattermost projects and how the contribution process works. One last thing before you start, please follow our Contributor Kindness guidelines while interacting with our community, this helps us foster a safe and inclusive environment for all contributors.

We have a variety of opportunities for you to get involved, let’s take a look!

Write E2E Tests with Playwright and RobotJS

For newcomers and community veterans alike, End-to-End (E2E) testing is a great way to get started making contributions to the Desktop app. The tasks are generally straightforward and will give you an opportunity to get more familiar with the code base as you build tests that interact with various components. 

We’re in the process of implementing Playwright and RobotJS for E2E testing and have quite a few open issues on the GitHub repo that are available for community contributors. You can find them by filtering the issues for the “E2E/Playwright” label; each individual issue contains further information about how to complete the test.

Other Ways to Get Involved

All of the issues with the “Up for Grabs” label are available for someone to volunteer their time. If you’ve been waiting for the right time to build an improvement you’ve always wanted to see, now is the time!  If your change is small, open a PR on the GitHub repository and we’ll review it! For larger changes, it’s typically better to discuss it with us first on our community instance or by opening an issue in GitHub. Take a look at our guidelines on contributing to Mattermost without a ticket for more details.

Lastly, we’re always accepting improvements to the Mattermost developer documentation. If you see any issues or places for improvement related to Desktop app development, you can submit your PR on the developer documentation repo.

Looking For Other Contribution Opportunities?

If this opportunity doesn’t seem like a good fit for you, there’s no need to worry. We’re making plans for plenty of contributor opportunities in 2022, so stay tuned for future updates. If you want to stay in the loop, sign up for our newsletter for announcements about future events.