Our commitment to building a thriving open source community is stronger than ever. We believe in empowering impactful contributions, and today, we’re excited to launch a new pilot initiative that puts this vision directly into your hands: the Starcraft Bounties Program.

This isn’t just about small fixes; it’s an invitation to tackle significant technical challenges and help us shape the future of our core development tools – Snapcraft, Charmcraft, Craft Parts, and the Craft CLI. If you’re passionate about robust software architecture, clean APIs, and excellent developer experiences, these bounties are for you.

What kind of technical improvements are we targeting?

Starcraft Bounties offer a range of projects designed to enhance the *craft ecosystem at its foundations. You’ll have the opportunity to:

• Design core services: we’re looking to create shared, robust services, like a unified linter service that can be used across all *craft applications. This means designing APIs, defining protocols, and ensuring extensibility.
• Refactor project structures: help us modernize complex systems, such as Snapcraft’s project model. The goal is to move towards more maintainable, schema-driven designs that improve everything from IDE support to documentation.
• Expand tool capabilities: extend the power of our tools by adding support for new features, like integrating new build systems through plugins, such as a Bazel plugin for Craft Parts.
• Enhance developer experience: improve how developers interact with our tools. This could involve implementing structured output formats in the Craft CLI or refining command behaviors for greater consistency and ease of use.
• Strengthen integrations: work on the interfaces between our tools and backend services, for example, by implementing the full Publishergateway API in Craft Store and ensuring our applications leverage these new capabilities.

Why get involved?

Participating in the Starcraft Bounties program means:

• Making a tangible impact: your code will directly improve the tools used by thousands of developers worldwide.
• Solving real-world engineering challenges: these are not trivial tasks; they involve thoughtful design and implementation.
• Collaborating with the core team: engage with Canonical engineers and other community members.
• Deepening your expertise: gain valuable experience working on advanced open source projects.

Ready to code?

This is a call to our community members to bring their technical skills and insights to the forefront. We’ve outlined the challenges, provided context, and set clear acceptance criteria for each bounty.

• Discover the full range of Starcraft Bounties here.
• Find a project that aligns with your technical interests.
• Understand how to claim a bounty in the issue details.

Let’s work together to build even more powerful, reliable, and developer-friendly *craft tools. We can’t wait to see what you’ll create!

– Maksim Beliaev and the Community team