By Alexandra Matthiesen
How humanitarian aid organization, Distribute Aid, makes a massive impact using CodeSee to onboard new contributors.
Problem
Onboarding new developers to Distribute Aid open source projects was requiring at least two four-hour pairing sessions to get folks up to speed. The sessions were challenging to schedule across a global team, and frequently left new volunteers feeling overloaded—an outcome that inspired project churn.
Solution
Distribute Aid integrated CodeSee into its onboarding workflow, including linking to CodeSee Maps in project README documentation. Prospective contributors were then able to asynchronously, easily explore the codebase, including project details placed in Labels and Notes—all before committing to a project. Not only did CodeSee help the Distribute Aid team preserve resources at the outset, but also in code review. Using Review Maps, project maintainers were able to quickly understand the proposed changes of incoming contributors.
Results
In Q4 2021, Distribute Aid saw impressive improvement in its end-to-end onboarding experience. The team saved an estimated 72 hours in onboarding time, and received more contributions to its projects than ever before—9 pull requests from new contributors. Ultimately, the team was able to refocus effort on delivering additional project features and tackle operational challenges—a set of feats resulting in an estimated $43,200 in aid delivered!
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Learn more about the incredible work of Distribute Aid and check out the organization's projects in our open source community, Open Source Hub!
