Please submit changes for review by forking and sending a pull request from your topic branch.
If your pull request changes UI, please include screenshots. This makes it easy for reviewers to provide copy, styling, and interaction feedback.
General style guidelines:
- 4-space indent in Python; 2-space indents everywhere else
- No trailing whitespace
- 80-character line limit
- Double-indent continuation lines
- Avoid checking in commented-out code (exceptions allowed where reasonable — for example, if a line is meant to be un-commented shortly after).
- Non-trivial functions should have explanatory docstrings/JSDoc.
- Try to avoid huge functions. If possible, break them up into reusable, logical helper functions that do one thing each.
For the most part, you can just stick to the conventions of the surrounding code.
See our style guide for language-specific guidelines.
For any major additions/changes to the UI, please draw some quick mock-ups on paper first. And by draw, I mean scrawl, scratch, barf graphite onto paper, whatever you want. They should be chicken scratches. (Bonus marks if you can actually train a chicken to scratch out your mock-up.) Mock-ups are purely meant to define interaction and layout -- not visual styling/design.
The idea is to be able to very quickly iterate on UI concepts, before it gets much more difficult to change once committed to code. It's also just easier psychologically for a reviewer to suggest big changes on a 5-minute chicken scratch than on beautiful shiny working code.
Another advantage of starting with low-fidelity mock-ups is that it focuses time and attention on trying and thinking of different layouts and interactions, instead of refining one and being stuck at a local maximum.
A pencil-and-paper mock-up also makes it easy to communicate to other team members what it is that you're building, concretely (heh).
You can paste your chicken scratches into HipChat for discussion.