Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Dan Walmsley, who works on Avalonia.
Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers
What can you tell us about your project?
I'm one of the many contributors for Avalonia, I've been contributing to the project for about 5 years.
Avalonia is a cross-platform UI framework. It allows you to write a very modern looking UI and run it on many different platforms - currently Windows, Mac and Linux. We have folks working on iOs, Android and Web Assembly. Avalonia can run on desktops, tablets, and small embedded devices like Raspberry Pi. It's flexible and you can build applications quite quickly.
It uses XAML for its UI markup, and C# code but we built it in a way that it's not tied to that. Some projects have spun off from Avalonia to use with F#, like FuncUI. It's originally based on a technology called WPF, so if you've used that you'll feel right at home. But it's not necessary to have any previous experience.
Avalonia has got a pretty big community around it now, and we seem to be growing pretty fast. Many open source as well as commercial applications are starting to adopt it. Some of the people that have been contributing have found job offers through the project.
What contributions are you welcoming?
Any and all contributions are welcome. You don't have to be a coder to get involved, you may be the person that likes making YouTube tutorials, or write blogs. Or evaluate Avalonia and give us feedback. Help other people in the community, answering their questions. Help improve our documentation. Or if you have graphic design skills, help design controls or help folks make their apps look good.
Code contributions can help to fix a bug, add a feature, or improve our website.
What skills do people need to contribute?
The most important things when contributing to Avalonia is enthusiasm, curiosity and a willingness to learn. If you like talking to many different people. Avalonia has many different technical aspects, like rendering techniques, GPU, UI controls, low-level OS APIs, embedded systems, compilers, language interopt... So if you're interested or want to learn about those areas, you're very welcome. You don't need to be an expert!
How do folks get started?
The best place to get started is to have a look at our website, avaloniaui.net, which has links to our Docs, examples, and getting started guides.
You can also join our Gitter chat. There are a lot of people willing to help you, so reach out to the team!
I suggest downloading some of the sample applications, try modifying those, play with those, and just have fun!
Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.
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