Lesson 14
Connect and Contribute
FIPS is small and young. Fewer than a dozen people ship code, and most of them answer DMs. This page lists who they are and where to find them.
Reach out on Nostr
Most FIPS discussion happens on Nostr, under the #FIPS hashtag. The contributors below are active there.
Nostr replies usually land within a day. GitHub issues can sit for a week. Ask first, file second.
Ways to help, in order of effort
Five ways to help, roughly sorted by effort. A single node that stays online for a year is worth more than a dozen drive-by PRs.
Run a node
Every node you keep online is a new peer someone else can reach. If it stays up for more than a day, add it to your bootstrap config so friends can pin you too.
Read a spec and file what you find
The design docs are the ground truth. If a paragraph is unclear, under-specified, or contradicts the code, that is a bug worth reporting. This site was written against them, so anything confusing here is probably worth fixing upstream too.
Ship a small patch
Walk the CONTRIBUTING guide, then send a focused PR: transport fixes, clippy warnings, docs, integration tests. Small PRs get merged fast and teach you the codebase.
Bring an application onto the mesh
Anything that speaks IPv6 works unmodified. The examples (Nostr relay, Kubernetes, WireGuard) are good starting points. Your own sidecar is the best way to pressure-test the IPv6 adapter.
Improve this site
Spot an inaccuracy, a confusing diagram, or a missing lesson? learn-fips is MIT-licensed and happy to take PRs.
If you only do one thing, run a node and leave it on.
Hear it from the source
Johnathan wrote the v0.1.0 announcement and sat down for a 36-minute conversation on No Solutions. Both are worth your time before you start hacking on FIPS.