Making Code Contributions

If you are interested in contributing code, thank you! Here are some guidelines (not requirements!) to help ensure a smooth process:

1. If relevant, create an issue first to discuss your proposed change with other contributors and users.
2. When you create a pull request, keep it focused on a specific improvement rather than many independent improvements (create separate PRs for those).
3. Try to keep each commit focused on a specific change.

The benefit of (1) is that it allows you to get some feedback on the proposed change from other users and contributors, which can save time and improve the outcome.

(2) has several benefits: It keeps scope bounded so that the PR is easy to review. And by minimizing interactions with many parts of the codebase, it also provides the most flexibility in merging the changes. As an example, if you are interested in submitting general documentation improvements and also contributing a specific improvement or feature, then put these in two separate PRs. That way, the documentation changes could be merged even if the feature isn't ready or if it is blocked on some other dependency.

The benefit of (3) is that it makes it easier for reviewers to understand the changes, and also helps in debugging issues in the future. For instance, if a bug were discovered in the future and it were traced to a specific commit, it would be easy to understand the bug if the commit is specific, and also easy to revert this commit if it doesn't include unrelated changes.