Show HN: CodeRelay – Contribute to open source 5 minutes at a time

Hello!

Clear statement of what the project does:

An Open source maintainer uploads a task to code relay (like document this function or fix this GitHub Issue).

Code Relay assigns this task to a contributor.

The contributor makes incremental progress on the task. Maybe the contributor splits the task into two subtasks, or writes one line of code.

Then code relay assigns the task to different contributor.

Like a relay race, the task gets passed on-and-on to different contributors.

Why I made it:

I made this because I sat down at my computer one day to work on open source and it took me 5 hours to:

- find a repo with a good-first-bug that I could do,

- clone the repo, build it, fix the bug

- make a pull request, fix pull-request, and get the pull request accepted,

I want to make contributing to open source and quick and painless as possible.

I want to live in a world where you can open your phone, make a contribution (no matter how small) in 5 minutes and be done.

I want to live in a world where Open source maintainers don't burn-out and let their projects die.

I want them to be able get the extra contributions they need without becoming a community manager/full-time marketer.

So that's why I made Code Relay.

Disclaimers:

I don't believe that Code Relay will replace fork-pull-request workflow, or the contributor-maintainer setup. I do believe that it can supplement both, make them stronger.

Likewise, I don't think Code Relay will be the most efficient use of a programmers' time. The constant context switching alone will slow everything down, and one maintainer with knowledge of a project can work faster than 10 programmers working for 5 minutes at time.

However, Code Relay's strength is that it attracts programmers that otherwise would not contribute to open source. My hypothesis is that 1000 programmers working for 5 minutes at time, is faster than 1 maintainer. It's a matter of scale.