How can I be helpful to contributors?

@towerofnix, @HanClinto, I see that y’all are making progress and I really appreciate it. 😄 I got a bit burned out on Leopard for a while, but your enthusiasm is getting me excited about the project again.

Right now the Leopard repos are all listed under my name and published using my npm account, but it probably makes sense to change that. Others contribute just as much as I do.

If it would be useful, I could…

• Move the leopard, leopard-website, and sb-edit repos to a Github organization
• Create Github Actions for automatically publishing the master branches to npm (side note: could be good to rename master to main)

Would this be useful? Are there other things I should do? I want this to be everyone’s project, not just mine.

[micahlt]

I would be overjoyed to work on both building the site (including project sandboxing, building the code editor, etc) and also community moderation and such. But I have a bad habit of jumping into things quickly and then failing to see them through, and I don’t want to make that mistake here.

Same here! Love what Leopard is doing, and I’d love to see a community site. I’ve built clients for social platforms before, so I would definitely be willing to put in some work on the frontend! Backend too, for that matter, as long as it’s in Node.

Would love feedback from everyone on the right scope/timing for a community like this.

I think for a project as big as this, it would be practical to take a good amount of time to plan. We’d need to know what frontend and backend frameworks to use, where projects would be stored, a source of long-term funding, and how we would gain users. Slow and steady wins the race - no need to start a bunch of development without at the least having a roadmap 😁 There’d also have to be a decent amount of work put into branding and such.

I’m all in - coming from Scratch, I’ve wanted to see a lighthearted alternative that caters a bit more to more experienced users while maintaining the strong community aspects. I’m super interested to see where this goes!

Edit: from what I see, leopard-website is currently built with Next. Next would probably be a great option for a community site like this, where a lot of the basic database actions could be abstracted to serverless functions.

[PullJosh]

I do have to mention that I don’t have a lot of time outright available for projects

That’s completely okay. 😄 There is no pressure to contribute, ever, and real life comes first. But the contributions you make are much appreciated! An extra set of eyes goes a long way.

Personally, I’d love to put more time and attention to sb-edit, the conversion layer between Scratch and JavaScript

Yes! sb-edit has a ton of potential. The current sb-edit API is pretty bad, but if its I/O features were filled out more, the internal representation was cleaned up and simplified, and the I/O and processing steps were all made more convenient, it could be amazing.

I don’t think I will ever have the desire to do that work myself, but the vision is clearly there for anyone who wants to pick it up. In the meantime, sb-edit will continue to be a means to an end for me. (A tool to make sb3 → Leopard conversion possible.)

I think a cool long-term goal for Leopard, albeit definitely scope-expanding, would be a community site to share projects written with Leopard on.

Now this is more up my alley. 😄 I completely agree that such a community doesn’t really exist today to the extent that it should, and we are actually pretty well-positioned to take on that job.

I am curious when you think a good time to start work on something like this would be. Should more work be put into Leopard itself first? Or would it be nice to put up such a site soon?

I would be overjoyed to work on both building the site (including project sandboxing, building the code editor, etc) and also community moderation and such. But I have a bad habit of jumping into things quickly and then failing to see them through, and I don’t want to make that mistake here.

Would love feedback from everyone on the right scope/timing for a community like this.