Let’s be honest: it really does take half an hour and that’s why we use Julia. 10-20 commits/PRs in an afternoon isn’t something that’s insane for casual Julia development. That usually swallows up the easiest issues.
Great to hear that you’re interested in contributing, and we’d obviously love to have you on board. In general, a good approach is to just get going on some toy problem and along the way you’ll find places where things are broken or could otherwise be improved.
Here are a couple of starting points if you just want something to hack away on. The completions code we use for Juno is fairly self contained, you just call it like completions("Base.f") and get back a list of applicable names with metadata. Right now we do completions for things like Pkg.add() and include() but that could easily be improved to handle more cases or other useful functions.
If you’re more interested in the JS / frontend side, I can thing of a few “beginner issues” that’d be really useful to solve. We’d like to have a command in Julia for clearing the console. We’d like to have support for some kind of .junorc.jl file, like .juliarc.jl but loaded once Juno is ready. It’d be nice to have a setting for where Julia command history is saved. All of these could be done as a few lines in atom-julia-client.
Let me know if you want any more information on any of those projects; I’m happy to point people towards the code they should be looking at (especially given that Juno is a pretty large, sprawling project).
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Add to that: there are some relatively easy issues in the plotting realm related to Windows bugs (since Tom doesn’t have Windows). If you search for Windows you’ll find some issues where it’s literally just that the path/command isn’t written for Windows, and you just need to give it an alternative when you’re on Windows.
One other very easy way to be a huge amount of help is to help with documentation. Run all of the tutorials and make sure they’re up to date. If not, file issues and find out how to fix them. Update parts of the docs you find confusing. You’ll learn the package inside and out, while being the most awesome person ever. Everyone loves someone who helps with docs!
Edit: For the repos we are dicussing, the doc repos are separate and found here:
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A quick kludge for clearing the screen in Julia ver 05/0.6 on GNU/Linux is at the REPL:
julia> ;
shell> clear
julia> … all pretty again 
Doesn’t ctrl + L work for you?
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It does, but I was not aware of that until now, thanks.
Edit: Your post prompted me to look for Key bindings etc, which I found at:
http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/interacting-with-julia#Key-bindings-1
I agree with @ehouse01, this post is very helpful and offers a concise but wide view of Julia.
To complete the information triangle, we should probably post that Julia is doing GSoC, and so you can get paid to contribute over the summer. That’s a good way to get started since you’ll have a mentor. Here’s a project list:
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