Contributing

Thanks for your interest in contributing to Hologram! 💜

Contributions happen through issues, not pull requests

Hologram has benefited from community pull requests in the past, and I'm grateful to everyone who sent one. For now, though, I write all the code myself. It's my full-time job, funded by sponsors, and this setup has turned out to be the most productive one by far. Once most of the design work is done, I'd like Hologram to have a core team maintaining it - but that's a later phase of the project.

Until then, the door isn't closed - it just moved. Here's the short version of why.

Writing code is the cheap part now. AI made it easy to produce, but no easier to verify, and with an external PR all of that verification lands on me, whether a human or an AI wrote the code. Given a good spec, it's faster for me to implement a feature than to properly review someone else's. That includes AI doing much of the typing - the difference is a tight feedback loop, where I iterate and benchmark along the way instead of auditing finished code after the fact.

The architecture is also moving fast. Everything that exists today is documented on the website, and the roadmap shows what's coming - but not how it'll be designed. Speccing that out publicly would be wasted effort, because it could change a month later. Which is why even good external code tends to make choices that won't fit where the framework is heading. I don't bolt things on top of Hologram: every feature has to fit the whole design, and that's much easier to get right when the design discussion happens before the code exists.

Issues are where that discussion happens. You describe the problem, we talk through the options, and it turns into a spec. That costs you an hour, not a weekend. When the feature fits the roadmap, you get it implemented by the person who knows where the architecture is heading, shaped around your actual use case. And your name goes in the release announcement. When it doesn't fit yet, the issue still shapes priorities, and there's often a workaround in the meantime.

What helps most

Bugs, feature requests, and docs feedback go through GitHub issues. For help with your own project, the Discord and the Elixir Forum are the places to get unstuck.

If a bug or missing feature is blocking you, say so in the issue and describe what it blocks - a project, a migration, a decision whether to adopt Hologram. Blockers weigh heavily when I decide what to work on next.

Sponsored by
Curiosum
Main sponsor
Erlang Ecosystem Foundation
Milestone sponsor
Previous
← Roadmap
Next
Package Naming →