# I think we're losing most potential contributors before they make their first contribution

**URL:** <https://discourse.beets.io/t/i-think-were-losing-most-potential-contributors-before-they-make-their-first-contribution/2148>\
**Category:** Development\
**Created:** [September 8, 2022, 12:40am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/i-think-were-losing-most-potential-contributors-before-they-make-their-first-contribution/2148 "2022-09-08T00:40:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

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**Author:** ![RollingStar](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/rollingstar/32/728_2.png) [@RollingStar](https://discourse.beets.io/u/RollingStar)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2022, 10:14pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/i-think-were-losing-most-potential-contributors-before-they-make-their-first-contribution/2148/3 "2022-09-08T22:14:26Z")

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hot take: Most people who were on the Internet in 1998-2013 has some MP3s on their computer. If 5-10% of those people have music that isn’t on streaming services, then beets has value. The ceiling on that 5-10% number is “what % of those people have so many files that it doesn’t make sense to manually fix the metadata?”.

Some attempt to document how to contribute:

> [@Request: Updated dev guide](https://discourse.beets.io/t/request-updated-dev-guide/1527):
>
> Seems there is some knowledge that isn’t in the dev guide itself. [https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/dev/index.html](https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/dev/index.html) The overall principle I would follow is document things unique to beets while give less/no detail on general development / Python development. If I get a handle on the content and formatting, I can put some of this information into the docs. How do I run tests? I got this [set up in VS Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/testing) but I’m not clear on the relationship between tox and individual Python testing pack…

With 55k lines of code as of 3 years ago, no wonder beets is so complicated:

> [@Merging with GitHub and Node.js](https://discourse.beets.io/t/merging-with-github-and-node-js/1033):
>
> Hi all, Newish user and new [contributor](https://github.com/beetbox/beets/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+author%3Ajef) here. I had a couple of questions that may have already been taking into consideration, but I am curious if any of them got captured. My first question is has the community considered using “Squash and merge” vs “Create a merge commit” on PRs via GitHub? Cleans up commit history pretty well. It also allows the project to not get bogged down with bloat-y intermittent commits (e.g. fixed typo, changed variable). And my second question is kind of a doozy. …

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