TOPIC:

Is there any way to volunteer as a developer? I have been a web developer for more than 15 years.

It depends...   FTH is very much a "DIY" kind of system in many ways and we are very constrained by zero budget and limited resources.  The system was never created with multiple developers in mind.  I have started down the path of making multiple developers possible, but there remains a good bit to do just to get it to the point of allowing for multiple developers to work on it.  I have tried to work w/ other developers in the past, but frankly, it is quite a big learning curve for the uninitiated--more than some people want to involve themselves with.   Also, anyone doing development on the system must be "full-stack" and be ok with working with Perl, mySQL, and Javascript.   I do want to migrate to using vue.js instead of the current Jquery based UI in the future, but we are just not there yet.

We are definitely *not* corporate/professional web development.  I am a novice with build tools: e.g. grunt/gulp/webpack, git, etc.  Unit testing does not exist (yet).  I am not a professional web developer--I am a degreed Chemical Engineer/Project Manager and am self-taught on web development.  (Despite that, I have done >95% of the development on FTH since 2013.)  Doing development for FTH is my "intellectual hobby".

If I have not scared you off yet, then we can have a conversation.  I will be looking for whether you have the right mindset for this endeavor, and whether it would be worth investing my limited free time to get you up to speed on FTH development.  

Thanks for your reply. I have not used Perl and only have a passing knowledge of MySQL. Normally, I use mIcrosoft SQL Server. I do use JQuery and Javascript. I have only used webpack  in so far as it was built into a template I used for React. I have built a react application, and several .net core apps. I do consider myself full stack for the tools I use.  I have a blog at  blog.todaydata.com/ . You can see it is mostly about .net development, with a few articles about Bootstrap and CSS and SEO and other miscellaneous.  Maybe I could help out in some ways. I don't mind  and enjoy learning a few things.

Ok, we could have a conversation...  keep in mind though that there are a lot of moving parts to FTH and many of those parts were basically DIY.   Perl is a "C-like" scripting language (syntax) but with some unique quirks and "kludginess".  I do have some system architecture docs (a bit outdated) that I can share w/ you.  

The thing is that it is really hard to just do the Javascript or just do the Perl...   I tend to be feature and technical functionality focused when doing updates.  For example, when I implemented the Meeting Venues functionality, I had to implement 1 new MySQL table, add a foreign key field to another table, implement several HTML and text templates, create Javascript, create Perl code, etc.  

Please understand that it would great to have someone else to work on development with.  I just need to make sure you are really prepared for what you would be getting yourself into... 

If it turns out that you really are up for it then we can talk about how to work together effectively and start targeting small updates to "get your feet wet".