Hacker Guide


No matter your experience in quantum tech or open source communities, you can help make quantum open source better (and get PRIZES!). This guide will help you understand more about the event and how you can make the most of it!

⌚ Before the Hack ⌚

Brush up on your open source contribution skills

Review the tech

Whether you are new to quantum technologies or work on them every day, here is a good list of general quantum computing resources that might be helpful to learn with or brush up on:

Dig into the docs

If there is a project from the participating projects that you think you want to work on, go through their docs and see if you can setup a project with the tool/software on your computer. If you have trouble with that then you can ask questions either by filing issues on the project repo, or on the #help-me channel on the Unitary Fund discord.

🔨 During the Hack 🔨

Join the discord

The main place that will be most helpful to you while you hack is connecting with other hackers and maintainers on the Unitary Fund Discord.
You can find folks from the Unitary Fund to ask about rules, as well as maintainers of the participating projects, and other hackers who might be able to lend a hand or team up (totally encouraged)!

Find a task to dive in on

Once you have found a project you want to work on, find an issue on that project you want to lend a hand on.
This could be one of the special bountied issues (meaning if you submit a maintainer accepted solution for we will send you CASH), or any other issue on that repo.
Pay special attention to issues tagged unitaryhack as they are ones the project maintainers have flagged as particularly good for contest participants to tackle.

If you have questions while working on the issue always feel free to ping folks on the Discord on the #hack-help channel.

If you want to team up with other folks on an issue that you have found, you can make a comment on the Github issue. Even if you don't plan to team up, commenting on Github may help other hackers know if someone else is working on that issue (that's fine, but depending on the issue, only one pull request may be merged to solve an issue). You can also comment on Discord in the #find-a-team channel.

Ask questions you might to someone live at office hours

If you want to talk to someone in real time about your contribution, we got ya covered! Hack office hours will be staffed by folks experienced in quantum and open source tools, and will be happy to help you out! You can see a calendar of times below, and the mentor will be hanging out in the #office-hours voice chat on Discord so feel free to drop in! Even if there are no office hours, always feel free to drop your question in #hack-help on Discord.

Make a pull request

Once you have a good solution to the issue, and have checked out the project's contributing guide (if they have one), you are ready to make your pull request or PR.
Check out the guides above if you are not familiar with Git or GitHub, or if you run into issues making the contribution, just ask on the Unitary Fund discord!

Make sure that you put [unitaryhack] in the title of your PR so the bots can find your contributions and make sure you get credit! You can additionally use the #share-your-hack channel on discord.

🎉 After the Hack 🎉

Show off your digital or IRL swag and check out what everyone else has done on the Discord, Twitter, and GitHub!
If you won any bounties or swag we will be in touch via email, so please make sure you sign up so we can connect your GitHub username to your contact info.