General questions about Gonum project and community

[Kamil Ziemian]

Hello,

I'm on my way to learn Go reasonable well and since I like digging into numerical computations I quite naturally ended here.

I want ask a question how Gonum community looks now, how many people is actively working and is any things to do around the project so simple that I can help with it? I don't believe that I good enough at Go or numerical methods to help in development of Gonum, but if you have some very simple job I will try to help. There are many open issues on GitHub, but it is quite hard to me to find issue that I can help a bit.

Also, I'm a person that constantly find small mistakes (typos in documentation, missing links on the page), but I don't want to be a nuisance by pointing them out, when are more important things to do.

Best
Kamil Ziemian

[Roman Werpachowski]

Hi Kamil,

Thank you for your interest in Gonum. The Gonum community is quite small now, with less than 10 core developers (off the top of my head).

If you'd care to submit PRs correcting typos in documentation or fixing links on the page, that would be great! Such contribution is always appreciated.

I think the best way to get started developing code is to find some topic which is particularly interesting in you but not supported fully in Gonum, and start hacking. I started contributing to Gonum when I knew very little about Go (I am still a Go newbie), but got much help along the way. Just don't get discouraged if the review process takes longer than you expected, and use it as an opportunity to learn more about Go and about the project :) If you haven't done it yet, I recommend going through the official Go tutorials first: https://golang.org/doc/tutorial/ (you don't need to know the database and REST stuff to contribute to Gonum, though).

Hope that helps,

Roman

[Kamil Ziemian]

Thank you for this words of encouragement. :) I can experimenting with Gonum only in my spare time, so depending how my work is going I can be missing and repairing again. Also, I need to read a lot for Go in this spare time, so things my go in different directions.

I hope this project will earn more core developers. Go deserves good numerical library.

PS. My native tongue is polish. I told it just in the case

Best
Kamil