Welcome! Thanks for looking for ways to contribute to the project. I'm a user of SymPy, so I appreciate all the volunteer efforts that running a complicated software project takes.
On Monday, August 3, 2020 at 7:49:55 PM UTC-4 [email protected] wrote: > Hi Sympy Community, > > My name is Xavier and I'm living in Arlington VA. My background is in > nuclear engineering and my work currently has me designing and doing safety > calculation for the fuel that goes into commercial reactors. Shortly after > leaving college, I discovered that I enjoyed programming and building > automation to solve the problems I was encountering. Coming from nuclear > engineering - a discipline where everything is very tightly regulated, any > physical project requires an enormous amount of capital, and you're > basically always working on something another scientist or engineer did 60 > years ago - it was interesting and refreshing doing programming work where > you can pretty much start from ground zero and build whatever you wanted. > Since then, I've programmed a little bit in my free time and used those > skills in the occasional work project. I'm at a point now where I'd like > to taking programming a little more seriously and start advancing my skills > and potentially see if I'd like to transition my career a little in this > direction. Before doing that though, I need to attempt to work on some > larger projects, collaborate with a team, and work on a large code base > (I've never built anything over ~500 lines or worked on a large > collaborative code base). My goal is to gain some of this experience by > contributing to sympy. Sympy looked like a good fit given that its written > in Python (which is the language I've primarily used) and is appears to > have a fairly low overhead when it comes to learning other supporting tools > and technologies. I also really enjoy math and would love the opportunity > to deepen my knowledge in that domain (I can recall back to my college days > when some of my friends thought of me as "that one engineer that doesn't > hate proofs"). > > To address the suggested questions introduction to contributing page: > > 1. I would describe my familiarity with Python as on the beginner side > of intermediate. I've been using for about 2 years now mostly > recreationally to solve math puzzles like FiveThirtyEight's The Riddler > <https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-riddler/> (which I highly > recommend to everybody), Project Euler, and small personal projects (like > a > web scraping and some very basic ML models). I've also had a few projects > at work that have focused on simple calculations, data extraction, or data > exploration. As I say above, none of the projects exceeded 500 lines of > code and I haven't work on a large collaborative code base. > 2. My math background goes a little further than the traditional > engineer's. I got a minor in math in college and took graduate math for > engineers. I think I can count the number of times I've attempted a proof > since college on one hand and admittedly I've lost a lot of my math > knowledge from school but I think my math aptitude is sufficient for > understanding most concepts with a little time and effort. > 3. As mentioned above, my background is in nuclear engineering so I've > worked a bit with physics simulation codes and Monte Carlo simulations > (mostly just as a user of these codes but have occasionally needed to go > under the hood a little bit). > 4. I'm not sure I've progressed far enough into programming to have > well-established specific algorithmic interests but in the past, I've been > interested in number theory algorithms and statistical algorithms like > Metropolis-Hastings and many of the ML model frameworks. > 5. I don't really have much familiarity with computer algebra > systems. I've used Sympy a little bit but much more Maple back in college > and a little Mathematic as well but I was always just using the software. > I never peeked behind the hood or took time to learn about the underlying > algorithms being employed. > 6. My experience with Sympy is very limited. I've started playing > with it more lately to see if it can help me solve some other problems > I've > been attempting from the Romanian Mathematics Magazine > <https://www.ssmrmh.ro/> (unfortunately I haven't been able to get > Sympy to work on these problems yet but perhaps that shouldn't come as a > surprise). And I would like to be able to recreate and play around with > the results from DEEP LEARNING FOR SYMBOLIC MATHEMATICS > <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.01412.pdf> that I found fascinating and > which uses Sympy. > 7. I'm a native English speaker and live in the DC metro area > (Arlington VA). > > Hopefully this helps give you a portrait of where I'm coming from. Looking > forward to working on Sympy. If you all have any recommendations for tasks > to get started with or anything else you think I should know, please > share. To start, I'll be looking to see if there are any contributions I > can make to the documentation and for any "Easy to Fix" or "Good First > Issue" tagged issues. > > Thanks for your time. > > -Xavier > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/456cbe9d-4629-4a80-8722-86c207f154f0n%40googlegroups.com.
