First-time contributor interested in SymPy and GSoC 2027
Shaik Suhail
Hi everyone,
I’m Suhail, a 1st year AI/ML student from Bengaluru ,India. This is my first time contributing to open source, and I’d like to start with SymPy with the goal of applying for GSoC 2027.
I’ve been working with Python, NumPy, pandas, and Matplotlib, and I’m really interested in how SymPy handles symbolic math. I’ve gone through the tutorial and contributing guide, and I’m setting up my local dev environment now.
Could you suggest a few beginner-friendly issues or modules that would be good for a first-time contributor aiming for GSoC? I’m especially interested in [1–2 areas, e.g., simplification, assumptions, calculus, matrices], but I’m happy to start anywhere that makes sense.
Any pointers on where to begin and how to build up towards a strong GSoC proposal would be really helpful.
Thanks in advance!
Peter Stahlecker
Shaik Suhail
Thank you for your response and the clear guidance Peter.
You’re right that I should start by exploring the open issues myself instead of waiting for specific suggestions. I’ll go through the issue tracker, focus on beginner-friendly and “Easy to Fix” labels, and pick something that matches my current skills and learning goals.
I also appreciate the note about AI. For actual contributions (code, tests, documentation), I will write everything myself, make sure I fully understand it, and follow the PR template carefully, including any required disclosures.
Thanks again for the advice. I’ll start looking at issues now and aim to submit a small, well-thought-out PR as my first contribution.
Aasim
Hi Suhail,
Soon enough, mails like these will be flooding the mailing list.
As Peter said, one can't guide you as you expect to here. But, I would also discourage you
from specifically waiting for an "easy to fix" issue because, in my personal opinion, they rarely
come around, and even if they do, they often turn out to be not so easy to fix. Lately, issues
haven't been getting tagged a lot simply because there's just too much to take a look at and
too few people to actually give them a look.
A novice contributor genuinely interested in contributing should, in my opinion, play around
with the code and understand roughly how things work. Eventually, you can filter out issues
from a submodule of your liking, something that you enjoy working with. For instance, for me,
it was the polys and ntheory submodules.
If GSoC is your ultimate goal, then you should probably take a look at how some project ideas
from the ideas list on the wiki have progressed through the years and how you can build over
one that matches your interests and strengths. Also, it will not be very useful to ask vague or
broad-scoped questions about GSoC on the mailing list, because it's just infeasible to answer
|questions like those. For example: "I find the xyz idea interesting, can someone tell me how to
work on it?" Specific and more focused questions, probably framed around your own work and
findings, have a higher chance of being answered.
I do think we should make such instructions a general template to reply to novice contributors
on the mailing list with for the very generic and common questions asked repetitively, mostly
for GSoC, because such mails almost always go unsurprisingly unentertained.
Best,
Aasim
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