@title Contributor Introduction
@group contrib

Introduction to contributing to Phabricator, Arcanist and libphutil.

= You Are Awesome =

Contributors are awesome. If you're thinking about contributing, that means
you're thinking about being awesome. That already makes you a little bit
awesome. But if you contribute you'll definitely be really, seriously awesome.

= Legal Stuff =

Before we can accept contributions, you need to submit a super fine and fancy
legal document called a Facebook Contributor License Agreement, which you can
find here:

https://developers.facebook.com/opensource/cla

= Not Sure Where To Get Started? =

If you want to contribute but aren't sure how (or want to try submitting a small
patch before you build something bigger) you can search the Phabricator
development install for open tasks in the "Bootcamp" project which are owned by
"Up For Grabs". These are small-to-medium-sized bugs and projects intended to
introduce new contributors to the codebase.

= Required Reading =

You should read the relevant coding convention documents before you submit a
change and make sure you're following the project guidelines:

  - @{article:General Coding Standards} (for all languages)
  - @{article:PHP Coding Standards} (for PHP)
  - @{article:Javascript Coding Standards} (for Javascript)

= Philosophy =

The Phabricator philosophy is simple tools that work well. Performance,
reliability, and ease of use are of paramount importance. This does not exclude
a rich featureset, but adding features shouldn't compromise these pillars.

One of Phabricator's main strengths is that it's pretty fast, but it got there
by accepting only patches which are also pretty fast and reverting out a bunch
of garbage that was really slow. Accepting a few slow patches undoes all this
work, so you need to be prepared to defend the performance of your patches. The
best way you can do this is to do your homework and come armed with concrete
performance measurements and information (XHProf profiles, EXPLAIN for query
plans, etc.)