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doc: add guide and answers to FAQs for first-time contributors#63685

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doc: add guide and answers to FAQs for first-time contributors#63685
joyeecheung wants to merge 5 commits into
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@joyeecheung

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This guide tries to capture some recurring issues I see (with suggestions that other collaborators seem to agree with in offline discussions) and address FAQs I constantly get when mentoring different new contributors.

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Review requested:

  • @nodejs/tsc

@nodejs-github-bot nodejs-github-bot added doc Issues and PRs related to the documentations. meta Issues and PRs related to the general management of the project. labels May 31, 2026
@joyeecheung joyeecheung force-pushed the first-time branch 2 times, most recently from bfc12f2 to 5a9bf7c Compare May 31, 2026 21:23
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Comment thread doc/contributing/first-contributions.md
@Renegade334

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Seemingly one of the more common tropes at the moment is opening PRs against issues with an existing open PR. I couldn't see any specific mention of this in our existing guidance, but this seems like a good place to discourage it.

@MikeMcC399

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As a new contributor I was confused by not being able to access Jenkins logs and I thought I must be missing some privileges. As I later found out, that was due to being locked out because a security release was being prepared. Perhaps that should be mentioned somewhere? Maybe not just in the FAQs for first-time contributors, but also in the regular PR submission guidelines?

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@joyeecheung

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@aduh95 @LiviaMedeiros @MikeMcC399 @trivikr @MoLow I think I addressed all the comments. Can you take a look again? Thanks!


Commit squashing is usually handled by the automation. Commits that are intended to be squashed away don't
have to follow the commit message guidelines - only the ones whose commit message will be kept after
squashing do. If your stack of commits are already approved and the CI has passed on them, don't worry

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squashing do. If your stack of commits are already approved and the CI has passed on them, don't worry
squashing do. If your commits are already approved and the CI has passed on them, don't worry

otherwise it would need to be "stack of commit is ..." to be grammatically correct, but that sounds a bit strange

label). The [commit queue automation](../../.github/workflows/commit-queue.yml)
will verify that the pull request meets all the requirements before merging it, but the
triggering of the commit queue still requires human judgement and depends on volunteers.
You can ask for help either in the pull request or in the slack channel similar

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You can ask for help either in the pull request or in the slack channel similar
You can ask for help either in the pull request or in the Slack channel similar

branding

If the change is labeled `dont-land-*`, it will be held back from releases in the specified branch until
the label is removed.

If the change is labeled `semver-major`, it will only not be included in the next "Current" release.

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Suggested change
If the change is labeled `semver-major`, it will only not be included in the next "Current" release.
If the change is labeled `semver-major`, it will not be included in the next "Current" release.

@MikeMcC399 MikeMcC399 left a comment

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This is a great document for new contributors! I wish it had been available when I started!

I just made some minor text editing suggestions, otherwise it looks very good to me.

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