darkfi/doc/src/development/contributing.md

Contributing

How to get started

Every monday 16:00 CET, there is our main dev meeting on our chat. Feel free to join and discuss with other darkfi devs.

In general, the best way to get started is to explore the codebase thoroughly and identify issues and areas of improvement.

Contribute according to your own interests, skills, and topics in which you would like to become more knowledgable. Take initiative. Other darkfi devs can help you as mentors: see the Methodology section of the Study Guide.

Few people are able be an expert in all domains. Choose a topic and specialize. Example specializations are described here. Don't make the mistake that you must become an expert in all areas before getting started. It's best to just jump in.

Finding specific tasks

Tasks are usually noted in-line using code comments. All of these tasks should be resolved and can be considered a priority.

To find them, run the following command:

git grep -E 'TODO|FIXME'

Areas of work

There are several areas of work that are either undergoing maintenance or need to be maintained:

• Documentation: general documentation and code docs (cargo doc). This is a very important work for example overview page is out of date.
• Tooling: Such as the drk tool. right now we're adding DAO functionality to it.
• Tests: Throughout the project there are either broken or commented out unit tests, they need to be fixed.
• Cleanup: General code cleanup. for example flattening headers and improving things like in this commit.
• ZK Debugger: The ZKVM needs a debugger so we can interactively inspect values at each step to see where problems go wrong.
• Events System: We need to fix IRCD, we will need to implement the events system.
• p2p Network: this is a good place to start reviewing the code and suggesting improvements. For example maintaining network resiliency. You can also look at apps like darkirc, and the event graph subsystem, and see how to make them more reliable. See also the task manager tau.