We are eager to enrich our discussions about sunpy and its affiliated packages with diverse voices and perspectives, including those of both users and developers.
The SunPy Project is open source, built on open source, and we'd love to have you hang out in our community.
Whether you have a suggestion for a new feature, or feedback about an aspect that's not functioning as anticipated, your input is important for the health of sunpy.
There are several avenues for you to share your thoughts, and we genuinely look forward to hearing from you.
The ideal starting point is our chat room, a vibrant community where hundreds of users and all the contributors to the SunPy Project gather. Here, you can find support and get answers to any questions you might have about sunpy, programming, or solar physics in general. If you prefer email, there is a mailing list, you can also ask questions or get major announcements about SunPy. If you prefer a forum, there is a discourse for the wider OpenAstronomy community that has a dedicated section for sunpy.
If you run into unexpected behavior or run into a bug we urge you to please report it. All bugs are kept track of on our [issue tracker] and please try to provide a minimal code example that reproduces the issue. This will make debugging and fixing the issue quicker.
If you're keen on contributing through coding or documentation, we highly recommend reading our Newcomers Guide. This guide is designed to be straightforward and accessible, requiring no prior experience. It provides all the necessary information to get you set up and actively working on the SunPy codebase with ease."
Imposter syndrome disclaimer: We want your help. No, really.
There may be a little voice inside your head that is telling you that you're not ready to be an open source contributor; that your skills aren't nearly good enough to contribute. What could you possibly offer a project like this one?
We assure you - the little voice in your head is wrong. If you can write code at all, you can contribute code to open source. Contributing to open source projects is a fantastic way to advance one's coding skills. Writing perfect code isn't the measure of a good developer (that would disqualify all of us!); it's trying to create something, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes. That's how we all improve, and we are happy to help others learn.
Being an open source contributor doesn't just mean writing code, either. You can help out by writing documentation, tests, or even giving feedback about the project (and yes - that includes giving feedback about the contribution process). Some of these contributions may be the most valuable to the project as a whole, because you're coming to the project with fresh eyes, so you can see the errors and assumptions that seasoned contributors have glossed over.
Note: This text was originally written by Adrienne Lowe for a PyCon talk, and was adapted based on its use in the README file for the MetPy project.