How to setup WikiEduDashboard for OSS contribution

1. Problem Statement I wanted to contribute to an open source project called WikiEduDashboard , a web application built by Wiki Education. It helps instructors and program leaders run Wikipedia-editing classes and campaigns: students join a course, make edits to Wikipedia, and the dashboard tracks their work. To contribute code to this project, I first need a working copy of it running on my own PC. This is called a "local development environment." Without it, I can't test any changes I make before sending them back to the project. The problem: this project was built with tools that work best on Mac or Linux, not on plain Windows. So the first challenge wasn't even the project itself, it was figuring out how to run a Linux-friendly project on a Windows PC. 2. The Solution (High Level) Instead of fighting Windows directly, we used a feature built into Windows called WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) . WSL lets a real Linux system (Ubuntu, in our case) run inside Windows, side by side with your normal Windows apps. It's not a separate computer or a virtual machine you have to babysit, it just works like an extra terminal environment on the same PC. Once inside Ubuntu, we could follow the project's official setup instructions exactly as written, since those instructions assume a Mac or Linux machine. The overall plan looked like this: Get a Linux environment running on Windows (WSL + Ubuntu) Get a personal copy of the project's code (fork it on GitHub, then clone it) Install the programming language the project is built with (Ruby) Run the project's automated setup script, which installs the rest of the required tools (database, background job system, etc.) Start the actual application and view it in a browser Build the frontend (the visual, interactive part of the site) Set up an editor (VS Code) that can actually see and edit the code living inside Ubuntu 3. Step by Step: What We Did and Why Step 1: Install WSL and Ubuntu What: WSL is a Windows feature that runs a re