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 have an IRC channel, on irc.freenode.net in #yt. 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.

Share Your Scripts

Warning

The yt Hub is currently offline due to some hosting problems. We hope to have it back up online soon.

The next easiest way to get involved with yt is to participate in the yt Hub. This is a place where scripts, paper repositories, documents and so on can be submitted to share with the broader community.

If you have a repository on BitBucket then you can simply submit it through the ytHub submit link. Otherwise, we provide the yt hubsubmit command, which will guide you through the process of creating a mercurial repository, uploading it to BitBucket, and then submitting it directly to the Hub.

This is one of the best ways to get involved in the community! We would love to have more examples that show complex or advanced behavior – and if you have used such scripts to write a paper, that too would be an amazing contribution.

Documentation

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 Whether that is adding a section, updating an outdated section, contributing typo or grammatical fixes, adding a FAQ, or increasing coverage of functionality, it would be very helpful if you wanted to help out.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 main yt repository (where the documentation lives in the doc directory in the root of the yt mercurial repository) 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.

Technical Contributions

Contributing code is another excellent way to participate – whether it’s bug fixes, new features, analysis modules, or a new code frontend. See Creating A New Code Frontend for more details.

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.

yt Community Code of Conduct

The community of participants in open source Astronomy projects is made up of members from around the globe with a diverse set of skills, personalities, and experiences. It is through these differences that our community experiences success and continued growth. We expect everyone in our community to follow these guidelines when interacting with others both inside and outside of our community. Our goal is to keep ours a positive, inclusive, successful, and growing community.

As members of the community,

  • We pledge to treat all people with respect and provide a harassment- and bullying-free environment, regardless of sex, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, nationality, ethnicity, and religion. In particular, sexual language and imagery, sexist, racist, or otherwise exclusionary jokes are not appropriate.
  • We pledge to respect the work of others by recognizing acknowledgment/citation requests of original authors. As authors, we pledge to be explicit about how we want our own work to be cited or acknowledged.
  • We pledge to welcome those interested in joining the community, and realize that including people with a variety of opinions and backgrounds will only serve to enrich our community. In particular, discussions relating to pros/cons of various technologies, programming languages, and so on are welcome, but these should be done with respect, taking proactive measure to ensure that all participants are heard and feel confident that they can freely express their opinions.
  • We pledge to welcome questions and answer them respectfully, paying particular attention to those new to the community. We pledge to provide respectful criticisms and feedback in forums, especially in discussion threads resulting from code contributions.
  • We pledge to be conscientious of the perceptions of the wider community and to respond to criticism respectfully. We will strive to model behaviors that encourage productive debate and disagreement, both within our community and where we are criticized. We will treat those outside our community with the same respect as people within our community.
  • We pledge to help the entire community follow the code of conduct, and to not remain silent when we see violations of the code of conduct. We will take action when members of our community violate this code such as contacting confidential@astropy.org (all emails sent to this address will be treated with the strictest confidence) or talking privately with the person.

This code of conduct applies to all community situations online and offline, including mailing lists, forums, social media, conferences, meetings, associated social events, and one-to-one interactions.

The yt Community Code of Conduct was adapted from the Astropy Community Code of Conduct, which was partially inspired by the PSF code of conduct.