[SciPy-dev] Volunteer for Scipy Project

[Anne Archibald]

2009/10/5 David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp>:
> Hi Arkapravo,
>
> Arkapravo Bhaumik wrote:
>>
>>     Dear Sir/Ma'am
>>
>>     I was in e-mail contact with one of your colleagues , Travis ;  I
>>     am very interested in contributing to scipy project as a
>>     volunteer. I believe that I can contribute in
>>
>>     (1) Documentation
>>     (2) Suggesting and developing newer functionality
>>     (3) Study similar software as Matlab, Mathematica, Maple etc
>>     trying to look for inspiration for possible improvements in scipy
>>
>
> Thanks for your help. As in most open source projects, the best way to
> contribute is to work on something that you actually need for yourself,
> be it code enhancement, bug fixes, documentation, etc...
>
> Depending on your interests and proficiency in python vs. C vs. Fortran,
> there are several things that could be worked on: the ones which need
> the most work ATM are scipy.special and scipy.interpolate.
>
> Please note also that you should be careful when 'studying' proprietary
> software - reimplementing from scratch a similar functionality is OK,
> re-using the implementation is almost never ok.

I would add a mode of working that is definitely okay: find a
reference to a journal article on how to compute the thing you're
interested in (possibly by finding the reference in
matlab/r/maple/mathematica/whatever source ordoumentation) and
implementing what is described in the research paper. This is a great
way to fill gaps in scipy with good, well-thought-out algorithms.

Anne