Re: New developer?

My first post. I have been looking for an accounts / ERP project to
contribute to and LedgerSMB looks really promising.

I'm a Computer Science student and have also worked in purchasing and
tax compliance. I'm hoping that contributing to LedgerSMB will allow me
to make use of my experience and also develop my programming, project
management (possibly) and teamworking skills.

My first step I guess is to play with the software, read the
documentation and try to get into the codebase... (if you'll have me)

First, we are an open community and try to cultivate a multi-vendor economy around our software. As far as customizations and integrations go, you will find us fairly supportive.

One thing I would recommend is that you sit down with one of us at some point (one of these weekends I would be glad to do it) and go over the history and structure of the codebase. The reason why this may be helpful is that we are still moving components (and large components) from the old SQL-Ledger codebase to something much cleaner.

To be honest, we're both moving off of the old SQL-Ledger code as well as some "first iteration" rewrite code; e.g. the payments code has been rewritten since SQL-Ledger, but if you compare that with code more recently written, like the configuration screens, it's in need of improvement.

Half an hour or an hour over IRC would be good, but it would be good to set up a time in advance.

"IRC" being #ledgersmb on freenode.net (irc://freenode.net/ledgersmb). I'm frequently around there as "ehu" and "ehuelsmann", but it might take some (hours?) before responding.

There are some notes in the manual I think about this but we probably need to revisit them at some point and they are probably not sufficient. I just suggest it because it may save you quite a bit of time wondering why things are the way they are (and in some cases there are no good reasons other than that we haven't rewritten that portion yet).

In addition to the manual, did you see the "community guide"? http://ledgersmb.org/community-guide has been built up over recent months to explain about coding guidelines, the release process, creating and updating translations and existing and target program structure.

Please help us improve the guide by adding items to it to help other new community members get started.

Bye,

Erik.

http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.

Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.