Virtually Attend FOSDEM 2026

Does your project get pull requests that you dread reviewing? Have you ever submitted a pull request that got ignored by project maintainers?

Putting together a pull request that presents proposed changes in a clear, well-organized way is nearly impossible for newer contributors to do on their own. Maintainers must take the lead in providing specific guidelines for pull requests for their project.

This talk will give maintainers a toolkit for teaching contributors how to produce PRs they’ll love to review. It’s derived from our experience onboarding hundreds of contributors to the Zulip open-source team chat project (https://github.com/zulip). I’ll cover:

• Using commit structure for storytelling
• Self-review guidelines and checklists
• Using PR descriptions to flag points of uncertainty
• Effectively demonstrating visual changes
• and more!

Key takeaways for current and future project maintainers:

• If you’re getting pull requests that are a pain to review, there’s a lot you can do to fix this!
• A toolkit of ideas to select from that will make your community PRs easier to review going forward.

Key takeaways for contributors:

• How to present your pull requests clearly, so that maintainers are happy to review them and give you prompt feedback.