New Member Intorduction

[Xavier Durawa]

Hi Sympy Community,

My name is Xavier and I'm living in Arlington VA.  My background is in nuclear engineering and my work currently has me designing and doing safety calculation for the fuel that goes into commercial reactors. Shortly after leaving college, I discovered that I enjoyed programming and building automation to solve the problems I was encountering.  Coming from nuclear engineering - a discipline where everything is very tightly regulated, any physical project requires an enormous amount of capital, and you're basically always working on something another scientist or engineer did 60 years ago - it was interesting and refreshing doing programming work where you can pretty much start from ground zero and build whatever you wanted.  Since then, I've programmed a little bit in my free time and used those skills in the occasional work project.  I'm at a point now where I'd like to taking programming a little more seriously and start advancing my skills and potentially see if I'd like to transition my career a little in this direction.  Before doing that though, I need to attempt to work on some larger projects, collaborate with a team, and work on a large code base (I've never built anything over ~500 lines or worked on a large collaborative code base).  My goal is to gain some of this experience by contributing to sympy.  Sympy looked like a good fit given that its written in Python (which is the language I've primarily used) and is appears to have a fairly low overhead when it comes to learning other supporting tools and technologies.  I also really enjoy math and would love the opportunity to deepen my knowledge in that domain (I can recall back to my college days when some of my friends thought of me as "that one engineer that doesn't hate proofs").  

To address the suggested questions introduction to contributing page:

1. I would describe my familiarity with Python as on the beginner side of intermediate.  I've been using for about 2 years now mostly recreationally to solve math puzzles like FiveThirtyEight's The Riddler (which I highly recommend to everybody), Project Euler, and small personal projects (like a web scraping and some very basic ML models).  I've also had a few projects at work that have focused on simple calculations, data extraction, or data exploration. As I say above, none of the projects exceeded 500 lines of code and I haven't work on a large collaborative code base.
2. My math background goes a little further than the traditional engineer's.  I got a minor in math in college and took graduate math for engineers.  I think I can count the number of times I've attempted a proof since college on one hand and admittedly I've lost a lot of my math knowledge from school but I think my math aptitude is sufficient for understanding most concepts with a little time and effort.  
3. As mentioned above, my background is in nuclear engineering so I've worked a bit with physics simulation codes and Monte Carlo simulations (mostly just as a user of these codes but have occasionally needed to go under the hood a little bit).  
4. I'm not sure I've progressed far enough into programming to have well-established specific algorithmic interests but in the past, I've been interested in number theory algorithms and statistical algorithms like Metropolis-Hastings and many of the ML model frameworks.  
5. I don't really have much familiarity with computer algebra systems.  I've used Sympy a little bit but much more Maple back in college and a little Mathematic as well but I was always just using the software.  I never peeked behind the hood or took time to learn about the underlying algorithms being employed.  
6. My experience with Sympy is very limited.  I've started playing with it more lately to see if it can help me solve some other problems I've been attempting from the Romanian Mathematics Magazine (unfortunately I haven't been able to get Sympy to work on these problems yet but perhaps that shouldn't come as a surprise).  And I would like to be able to recreate and play around with the results from DEEP LEARNING FOR SYMBOLIC MATHEMATICS that I found fascinating and which uses Sympy.  
7. I'm a native English speaker and live in the DC metro area (Arlington VA).  

Hopefully this helps give you a portrait of where I'm coming from. Looking forward to working on Sympy.  If you all have any recommendations for tasks to get started with or anything else you think I should know, please share.  To start, I'll be looking to see if there are any contributions I can make to the documentation and for any "Easy to Fix" or "Good First Issue" tagged issues.  

Thanks for your time.

-Xavier

[Ben]

Welcome!  Thanks for looking for ways to contribute to the project.

I'm a user of SymPy, so I appreciate all the volunteer efforts that running a complicated software project takes.

[Oscar Benjamin]

Hi Xavier,

It's great that you're interested in contributing to sympy. You ask if
there are and recommendations to get started so:

Some issues are labelled as "easy to fix" or "good first issue" on
Github. Those are supposed to be things that can be fixed easily but
that you can use as an introduction to sympy's pull request workflow.

More generally I would say that it is good to work on some part that
most interests you or where you are most confident with the maths.
There are many open issues on Github so you can find some outstanding
problems to fix in any part of sympy. The open issues are all labelled
where the label represents the subpackage of sympy e.g. "integrals" or
"solvers" or "solvers.dsolve". The labels aren't always intuitive
because the package names aren't e.g. "concrete" is the package that
contains the code for summations so any issues with summations are
labelled as concrete.

Another approach is to make use of sympy for something in an
application domain (e.g. some calculations related to nuclear
engineering) and then you can see where any limitations of sympy arise
and use that as a guide for making improvements to sympy.

Oscar

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