Contributing

You are very welcome to contribute to this package by forking the github repository and creating pull requests. Pull requests should always be sent to the dev branch. We especially appreciate contributions in relation to packaging, e.g., making the package available on conda-forge or improving pip dependencies.

Using the conda environment specified in the requirements.yml file and located in the root directory is the easiest way to start contributing to the code.

The style guide mostly follows PEP 8, but it uses some important modifications that can be found in .vscode/settings.json. If you use Visual Studio Code, you can use these settings to make sure that your code follows the basic rules of the style guide. The most important modifications/additions are:

1. We allow line length to be 99 characters for both code and docstrings,

2. We allow the use of capital I as a variable,

3. We use type hints introduced in PEP 484.

We generally follow naming conventions with descriptive variable and function names, but we often use short variable names for the very mathematical parts of the code to replicate the variables used in the references. We believe this makes it easier to link the code to the theory.

We encourage you to keep individual contributions small in addition to avoid imposing object-oriented design patterns. We are unlikely to accept contributions that use inheritance without exceptionally good reasons and encourage you to use composition instead.