Project Maintainer Guide

Our goal at the Unitary Fund is to build a quantum technology ecosystem that benefits the most people. That starts by supporting and growing the great ecosystem of projects already out there that is maintained by amazing folks like you.

It is always important for projects to find skilled and committed contributors that can do things like help develop new functionality, maintain existing tools, and write tests and documentation. This can be challenging in open source in general, but can be especially difficult for open source projects that need specialized skill sets like quantum computing. unitaryHACK shows folks what amazing projects are already out there, helping drive quantum computing forward, and helping you find new contributions for your projects.

We have some outlines below for what you can expect before and during the event, as well as the rules for the event.

🗓️ Maintainer Timeline 🗓️

ASAP: Maintainers from invited projects fill our participation form
May 23 at 9 am PT: Maintainers party + Q&A
Review of the event + rules
Answer any initial questions folks have about the event
Give a short intro about your project
May 6th: Maintainers submit bounties for review
May 24th All issues must be finalized
May 29th unitaryHACK opens
June 12th: unitaryHACK closes
June TBD: Awardees finalized

⌚ Before the Hack ⌚

Get your project ready for more eyes on it! Some tips:

If you have a good first issue label, it will be a good time to review it.
Ensure you have CONTRIBUTING.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md files at the root of your repo (or similar) so folks can learn how they should make their contributions to make your life easy.

In April, we will distribute a form to finalize which issues you'd like to put up for bounties, and the associated rewards associated. We will review the issues to make sure there is a good balance across the event. This year we are keeping the bounties secret until the day of the event to ensure fairness.

How to choose good issues for participants

To make sure that everyone can participate in the hackathon, we encourage project maintainers to tag a variety of issues that may or may not include quantum content, may or may not require devops skills, etc. We understand projects can be very targeted so if this is not possible that's totally fine! Our goal is to help connect eager and skilled contributors to your projects to help make the quantum open source ecosystem better 💖

🛠️ During the Hack 🛠️

As the hackathon progresses (and sometimes right away if there are eager folks who read up on the project), you should get some useful PRs! If a PR does not meet a minimum bar for quality, or if another PR has been accepted, please provide some details through PR comments that it is not accepted.

For bountied issues, once you have accepted a pull request (or closed an issue) please assign the hacker to the issue so that our bots can understand it as complete, and distribute the bounty accordingly. If multiple people will be splitting the bounty, assign multiple. Bounties will not be distributed until the end of the event, so if there are any confusion, please don't hesitate to reach out to hack@unitary.fund.

🙋 FAQ 🤔

What will be expected of me/my team?

In preparation for the hackathon, your project will need to file a series of bountied issues. These can range in difficulty, however they should be well scoped, and provide slightly more background than normal so an external contributor with the right skills can get oriented quickly.

During the hackathon the expectation is that PRs opened by hackers are addressed in a reasonable time frame. Since many hackers are contributing on nights and weekends, giving feedback with ample time to make subsequent changes is very important.

Maintainer workflow

Logistically, these are the steps a maintainer will take during the hackathon.

Hacker opens a PR on your project.
Maintainer reviews/requests changes as needed.
When PR is merged (or approved), maintainer assigns hacker to the bountied issue so our bots can understand who the bounty should be distributed to. In the cases where the bounty should be split, assign multiple hackers.

How much activity should we expect to see?

In previous years we've seen some projects garner more attention, and some less. Generally, the more time you've taken to carefully select, scope, and detail issues to be put up for bounty, the more attention you should expect your project to see. Check out last years results to get a more detailed sense.