Requesting guidance for contributions

[Shireen]

Hello!

I'm Shireen Shaikh, a third year student at BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, India. I'm currently pursuing a Masters in biological sciences and a Bachelors in engineering. I have a keen interest in the intersectional field of biology and computing and I'm actively looking to develop the required skill set to excel in the field.

I have worked in

• Python
• C language 
• docking tools such as Autodock and Schrodinger
• used pytorch, scikit-learn for ML projects
• used OpenCV for object detection

Through GSoC organisations, I had come across MDAnalysis and was thrilled to see it match my interests. I'm reaching out to you to learn more about your organisation, MDAnalysis and how I could possibly make contributions. I'm enthusiastic about learning new things your organisation might require.

Looking forward to hearing from you. 

Sincerely 

Shireen Shaikh

[Project Manager MDAnalysis]

Hi Shireen,

Welcome to MDAnalysis, and thank you for expressing your interest in the project! While we are planning to apply for the GSoC 2024 program, it is not guaranteed that we will be selected by Google as an organization. No matter what happens, we of course welcome you to start learning MDAnalysis and contributing outside of GSoC!

MDAnalysis is a Python package for analyzing molecular simulations data. We have a few introductory videos that can give you an idea of what problems MDAnalysis is solving. If you haven't used MDAnalysis before, the best way to get started is to get your hands dirty following the MDAnalysis User Guide. We suggest starting with installing the MDAnalysis package and going through the Quick Start Guide. Other sections of the User Guide go into many more details about the different capabilities of MDAnalysis. 

Once you are a bit familiar with the MDAnalysis package, you can look at the sections of the User Guide explaining how to contribute. There are detailed explanations on how to set up a developer environment and how to contribute to the MDAnalysis codebase. This is a great starting point for contributing to MDAnalysis and trying to solve some of the open issues.

Hopefully this will help you get started, but please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions. You can also post on our new GitHub Discussions forum or Discord server (join using this invite link) to interact with other MDAnalysis users and developers. 

We look forward to your contribution.

All the best,
Jenna

--

Project, Community and Outreach Manager
MDAnalysis * https://www.mdanalysis.org/

a fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS

GitHub: https://github.com/MDAnalysis

Twitter: @mdanalysis

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/mdanalysis