Introduction to Stan for New Developers

Welcome to Stan! We're excited that you are interested in contributing to the project. Before you can contribute you will have to familiarize yourself with the particular processes for new contributions that we have incorporated to facilitate the growth of the project.

Firstly, the Stan project is hosted on GitHub so you will have to create a GitHub account if you do not yet already have one. Secondly, developer discussions are hosted on Discourse so you will have to create an account there in order to ask questions or participate in discussions.

Every developer has their own local development setup, but we have compiled various helpful that you might find useful.

Style

https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/wiki/Code-Quality https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/wiki/Coding-Style-and-Idioms

Testing

https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/wiki/How-to-Write-Unit-Tests-with-GoogleTest https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/wiki/Testing-Stan-using-Gnu-Make-and-Python

Contributing

Lots of good Git tutorials online.

https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/wiki/Dev:-Git-Process https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/wiki/Developer-process-overview

https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/wiki/Testing:-Continuous-Integration

Contributing Core Code

• C++, Templates http://www.agner.org/optimize/optimizing_cpp.pdf https://www.amazon.com/Templates-Complete-Guide-David-Vandevoorde/dp/0201734842 https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Design-Generic-Programming-Patterns/dp/0201704315

Contributing to the Interfaces

• May need core code knowledge

• Adding auxiliary functions, etc.

• Now go checkout issues trackers on GitHub!