Hi everyone,
A little while ago, I made the observation that many open source projects on GitHub use so-called “shields” to quickly convey some key pieces of information about the project to visitors.
I’ve been thinking that, especially for newcomers to the project, there may be value in having a few such shields on the LLVM’s github page.
Below, I’ve put a number of example shields that look like they could be valuable.
We can have all of the information that the shield provides as plain text in the README.md file. But it seems like these shields have emerged as a de-facto standard way to quickly convey some key pieces of information about an open source project.
I’m looking for thoughts, opinions, feedback on which shields, if any, would be good to have on the LLVM project’s home page on github at https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
1. Shields pointing to various communication channels used by the community
- Discourse:
- Discord:
(At the time of writing, this shield does not work - a setting needs to be enabled by one of the LLVM Discord admins to enable this shield to show how many people are online in our Discord space) - LLVM YouTube channel:
- Twitter:
2. Shields pointing a potential new contributor to where to start
- Good starter issues:
- A shield pointing to https://llvm.org/docs/GettingStarted.html:
We could add a few more pointers to key “starting points” of documentation…
3. Shields documenting project activity/health
- Number of contributors:
Note that the Discourse system seems to cache the images of the shields, and it seems that as a result some of them may not show correctly in the Discourse post.
I’ve put the example shields above also up in the following github gist - which should show the labels correctly: llvm-shields.md · GitHub. Most of the shields are clickable.
