My First Contribution - A PowerShell VS Code Extension Story

The PowerShell VS Code Extension is a very popular tool, and is Open Source. The maintainers do a great job, but can always use help from the community. This talk will describe my journey as I added the Syntax folding feature, and give tips for people who want to contribute to the extension.

The PowerShell VS Code Extension maintainers do a great job but there’s only a few of them. They can always do with help from the community, but it can seem very daunting to make that first change.

That was me a few months ago. I wanted to add a feature but the codebase was large and somewhat foreign. How do I setup my development environment? What rules and processes are there? Where do I go for help?

This talk will traverse my journey; From the bewildering rocky start, to the cautious raising that first Pull Request, to the joy of getting my feature merged, to the elation of seeing someone say “Thank you” for my efforts, and finally to the sadness of the first bug report.

Submitting your first contribution can be hard but I will give you practical tips and advice on how to avoid the pitfalls!

This talk focuses primarily on the Extension code itself (NodeJS), and not the PowerShell Editor Services (C#). That’s a whole other talk!