Hello Harshwardhan,
Welcome to MDAnalysis!
Contributing to MDAnalysisIn the first instance, we recommend our User Guide for getting to know MDAnalysis:
https://userguide.mdanalysis.org/The User Guide contains a lot of information about MDAnalysis, as well as a section on how to contribute to the project:
https://userguide.mdanalysis.org/contributing.htmlOn our GitHub repository (
https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis) we have several issues labelled as "difficulty-easy" and/or "good-first-issue", which are a good starting point for new developers.
For questions about the project we have several communication channels. Besides the MDAnalysis-discussion (about usage) and MDAnalysis-develop (about contributing/developing) mailing lists, we have a Discord Server that anyone can join:
https://discord.gg/fXTSfDJyxEBy joining the MDAnalysis Discord Server, and by starting to work with the MDAnalysis community, you agree to our Code of Conduct:
https://www.mdanalysis.org/pages/conduct/Participating to Google Summer of Code (GSoC)
GSoC 2023 has been announced by Google and the MDAnalysis organisation decided to re-apply this year. Likely we won't hear about whether or not MDAnalysis has been selected to participate to GSoC until the end of February. Until Google makes a decision on participating organisations, there is always a chance that MDAnalysis might not be selected this year.
For the time being you can have a look at the MDAnalysis FAQ for GSoC from the previous year:
https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis/wiki/GSoC-FAQWe will most likely have a very similar process to 2022. You can have a look at the list of Project Ideas we intend to propose this year:
https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis/wiki/GSoC-2023-Project-IdeasPlease have a look at the "Relevant Skills" section for each project to make sure you have the relevant skills, or that you can acquire such skills during the application process. Given the scope of MDAnalysis as scientific package for particle-based simulations, we especially value skills related to domain knowledge (molecular dynamics, computational chemistry, computational physics, ...) together with programming skills.
You can start contributing to MDAnalysis as explained above, and stay tuned for more announcements about GSoC.
The MDAnalysis community looks forward working with you.
Rocco