The Unitary Fund invites you to participate in our first quantum open source hackathon!

Our goal at the Unitary Fund is to build a quantum technology ecosystem that benefits the most people. That starts by supporting and growing the great ecosystem of projects already out there that is maintained by amazing folks like you.

It is always important for projects to find skilled and committed contributors that can do things like help develop new functionality, maintain existing tools, and write tests and documentation that helps new users and contributors. This can be challenging in open source in general, but can be especially difficult for open source projects that need specialized skillsets like quantum computing.

We want this event to show folks in the open source software community what amazing projects are already out there, helping to drive the field of quantum computing forward, and helping you find new ways and people to help grow your projects.

We have some outlines below for what you can expect before and during the event, as well as the rules for the event.

Timeline:

  • March: Contact and organize participating projects and funding
    • March 15th Maintainer AMA call
  • April: Setup and test infrastructure for tagging/automation
  • May 14-30th: Hackathon starts and reviewing of PRs begins
    • May 14th - Kickoff Call on Discord
      • Review of the event + rules
      • Give a short blurb about all participating projects
      • Can answer any initial questions folks have about the event on discord

Before the event

  1. Tag your repo with unitaryhack as well as any issues on your projects you would like people to work on (#unitaryhack). We are looking for ~4 issues for each project (totally can be more, just a place to start) of a variety of difficulty levels.
  2. Identify if there are any issues you want to put a bounty on to specifically encourage participants to tackle them. Our goal is to have at least one bounty issue per project, and we can scale that based on the size of your project’s codebase.
  3. Make sure you have CONTRIBUTING.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the root of your repo (or similar) so folks can learn how they should make their contributions to make your life easy.
  4. Make a PR to this repo adding your project to the participating projects list with:
    1. A short description of your project with links to it,
    2. Links to the issues you would like to put bounties on, an a short description if you want of the associated issue (not necessary). We will work with you to make sure we get the bounty values correct.

    You can see an example of a project listing by checking out the one for our project Mitiq.

During the event

Hopefully you should be getting helpful PRs! If a PR does not meet a minimum bar for quality, or if another PR has been accepted, please communicate on the PR conversation that it is not accepted, and tag it as rejected or duplicate as appropriate.

For bountied issues, mark the PR you want it awarded to with unitaryhack-accepted and we will take care of sending out the bounty!

If you want a way to chat more synchronously with folks working on PRs we will be hosting hackerspaces on our Discord channels for people to hangout and work on the hackathon together!

How to choose good issues

To make sure that everyone can participate in the hackathon, we encourage project maintainers to tag a variety of issues that may or may not include quantum content, may or may not require Dev Ops skills, etc. We understand projects can be very targeted so if this is not possible that’s totally fine! Our goal is to help connect eager and skilled contributors to your projects to help make the quantum open source ecosystem better 💖

If you have any questions/comments/suggestions for this event we would love to hear from you, just send us an email at sarah@unitary.fund!

Helpful resources