Onboarding

[henriqueweege]

Hi guys! Hope everyone is doing great!
As I stated in the telegram group some days ago, I would really love to contribute to this project through coding, but until now, I am feeling quite lost with everything, and although I did look into the documentation, I was unable to find something that explained about the structure of the project or how it works in depth. I would like to know: there is something like that? I really think that this would be of great help to make the process of knowing the platform easier.
Please, if you have any suggestions on how I can familiarize with it, let me know!

Cheers,
Henrique

[timunie]

check out src/samples ^^ Other than that, nothing I'm aware of.

[henriqueweege]

@timunie thanks!!

[stevemonaco]

There's no enforced pattern as project and folder structure is an opinion. Projects with different architectures and different supported platforms will necessarily organize themselves a bit differently. Same if you have multiple clients (eg. Avalonia and a standalone console app), use a pattern other than MVVM, use feature folders instead of separate folders for Views and ViewModels, etc.

You might check out some of these projects for comparison: ChatGPT Client, WalletWasabi, TileShop for ideas that might fit your project.

[henriqueweege]

@timunie and @stevemonaco thanks for your replies.
Maybe I wasn't clear, and I am sorry for that, let me try to explain myself.
The problem I am facing is that, although I did clone the project, looked into it, and ran it as the docs show, I am unable to grasp how the parts interact with each other. So, for example, the project "_build", the name indicate that this project have something to do with the build process, but following the docs I needed to build another project to run Avalonia. This lack of understanding of how the parts work together to make the whole, is something that I need to overpass to be able to successfully contribute to the project.
My question is, besides looking into src/samples, as @timunie spotted, there is another ways to fulfill this gaps of knowledge?

[stevemonaco]

There's an in-progress contributing PR from a few days ago. You might check that out. For building, there's an article on the wiki. It's pretty disjointed, so if a team member doesn't correct me, you might want to create an issue about consolidating these resources and to document the major project components for new contributors.

[henriqueweege]

I really think that a more structured onboarding process would be of great help for newbies as myself, so I will follow your advice. I will just wait a little bit to give anyone the possibility of reply to this thread before I open an issue.
Thanks a lot!!

[timunie]

Talked to the team just now. We have:

new: https://avaloniaui.net/Blog/avalonia-platform-support-why-it-s-simple,ca378b03-fb47-4c34-a347-182acaa43d05

older: https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/wiki/High-level-architecture-overview

But probably it's not 100% well enough for beginners. So probably you can note down what was missing for you while trying to understand the code base and help us to make onboarding better?

[henriqueweege]

@timunie thank you very much!!
For sure I will do that. Will be nice to be able to contribute in some way!
Thanks again!!