Getting Involved¶
There are lots of ways to get involved with yt, as a community and as a technical system – not all of them just contributing code, but also participating in the community, helping us with designing the websites, adding documentation, and sharing your scripts with others.
Coding is only one way to be involved!
Communication Channels¶
There are four main communication channels for yt:
- We also have an IRC channel, on irc.freenode.net in #yt, which can be a bit less on-topic than the mailing lists. You can connect through our web gateway without any special client, at http://yt-project.org/irc.html . IRC is the first stop for conversation!
- yt-users is a relatively high-traffic mailing list where people are encouraged to ask questions about the code, figure things out and so on.
- yt-dev is a much lower-traffic mailing list designed to focus on discussions of improvements to the code, ideas about planning, development issues, and so on.
- yt-svn is the (now-inaccurately titled) mailing list where all pushes to the primary repository are sent.
The easiest way to get involved with yt is to read the mailing lists, hang out in IRC, and participate. If someone asks a question you know the answer to (or have your own question about!) write back and answer it.
If you have an idea about something, suggest it! We not only welcome participation, we encourage it.
Documentation and Screencasts¶
The yt documentation – which you are reading right now – is constantly being updated, and it is a task we would very much appreciate assistance with. Whether that is adding a section, updating an outdated section, contributing typo or grammatical fixes, adding a FAQ, or increasing coverage of functionality, it would be very helpful if you wanted to help out.
The easiest way to help out is to fork the repository:
http://hg.yt-project.org/yt-doc/fork
and then make your changes in your own fork. When you are done, issue a pull request through the website for your new fork, and we can comment back and forth and eventually accept your changes.
One of the more interesting ways we are attempting to do lately is to add screencasts to the documentation – these are recordings of people executing sessions in a terminal or in a web browser, showing off functionality and describing how to do various things. These provide a more dynamic and engaging way of demonstrating functionality and teaching methods.
One easy place to record screencasts is with Screencast-O-Matic but there are many to choose from. Once you have recorded it, let us know and be sure to add it to the yt Vimeo group. We’ll then link to it from the documentation!
Gallery Images and Videos¶
If you have an image or video you’d like to display in the image or video galleries, getting it included it easy! For the image, you can either fork the yt homepage repository and add it there, or email it to us and we’ll add it to the Image Gallery. If you have a video, just add it to the yt Vimeo group.
We’re eager to show off the images you make with yt, so please feel free to drop us a line and let us know if you’ve got something great!
Technical Contributions¶
Contributing code is another excellent way to participate – whether it’s bug fixes, new features, analysis modules, or a new code frontend.
The process is pretty simple: fork on BitBucket, make changes, issue a pull request. We can then go back and forth with comments in the pull request, but usually we end up accepting.
For more information, see How to Develop yt, where we spell out how to get up and running with a development environment, how to commit, and how to use BitBucket.
Online Presence¶
Some of these fall under the other items, but if you’d like to help out with the website or any of the other ways yt is presented online, please feel free! Almost everything is kept in hg repositories on BitBucket, and it is very easy to fork and contribute back changes.
Please feel free to dig in and contribute changes.
Word of Mouth¶
If you’re using yt and it has increased your productivity, please feel encouraged to share that information. Cite our paper, tell your colleagues, and just spread word of mouth. By telling people about your successes, you’ll help bring more eyes and hands to the table – in this manner, by increasing participation, collaboration, and simply spreading the limits of what the code is asked to do, we hope to help scale the utility and capability of yt with the community size.
Feel free to blog about, tweet about and talk about what you are up to!
Long-Term Projects¶
There are some wild-eyed, out-there ideas that have been bandied about for the future directions of yt – some of them even written into the mission statement. The ultimate goal is to move past simple analysis and visualization of data and begin to approach it from the other side, of generating data, running solvers. We also hope to increase its ability to act as an in situ analysis code, by presenting a unified protocol. Other projects include interfacing with ParaView and VisIt, creating a web GUI for running simulations, creating a run-tracker that follows simulations in progress, a federated database for simulation outputs, and so on and so forth.
yt is an ambitious project. Let’s be ambitious together.