Codespaces instructions in CONTRIBUTING.md

[devon3583]

Codespaces improves accessibility, consistency, and efficiency, so we think it will be beneficial to document for future contributors in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Codespaces is particularly beneficial to new contributors in learning to code faster with few to little setup issues. The development setup is already included in Codespaces, as well as no dependency installation is required. In our instance for setting up in Codespaces the instructions aren't clear to contributors who are using this method. It took our team as little as 15 minutes to set up in Codespaces, which goes to show that Codespaces is more accessible and efficient while contributing to repositories.

We would be excited to contribute to this issue!

This issue is co-authored by : @purpleskates123 @dcaine125 @jakbrownbytes @kailealee @smrghsh

[devon3583]

Hey @spencerschrock we started working on this documentation update. What are your thoughts on this?

[spencerschrock]

Hey @spencerschrock we started working on this documentation update. What are your thoughts on this?

We document our environment setup steps, but not for any particular IDE. I'm hesitant to favor one vs another, especially a paid service.

[kailealee]

Thank you for your feedback @spencerschrock, we totally understand your concern. We weren’t trying to promote a particular IDE or paid service. We thought adding instructions for using Codespaces would be helpful since it’s a fast and easy way to get started. For new contributors, it could simplify the setup process and make it easier to jump into contributing. It took me over an hour to get Scorecard running locally on my machine after downloading all the tools and running scorecard, so we figured a quicker alternative might encourage more first time contributions.

[spencerschrock]

It took me over an hour to get Scorecard running locally on my machine after downloading all the tools and running scorecard,

Were there any parts that could be better described in the CONTRIBUTING.md?

[kailealee]

No, the steps are clear. I was just suggesting an alternative pathway into the project that I think might help new contributors start contributing quicker. We totally understand if this isn't what OpenSSF want to do. Thank you for considering regardless!