Google Season of Docs 2019: MDAnalysis | Positions | Beckstein Lab

The MDAnalysis Open Source Project is a Python-based library for analyzing particle simulations in biophysics, chemistry, and the materials sciences. MDAnalysis is looking for a technical writer to participate in Google Season of Docs (GSoC) 2019 and help to improve the documentation so that users can get more science done faster.

MDAnalysis was accepted for Google Season of Docs 2019. We are proud to be one of 50 participating open source organizations, which span all reaches of open source and includes the Wikimedia Foundation, NumPy and SciPy, the CERN High Energy Software Foundation, Drupal, Arduino, LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, and many more outstanding projects that really have been moving the open source community forward.

The MDAnalysis team would love to have a technical writer work with us to improve our documentation. If you want to work with scientists that write code to do science at the molecular scale then please contact us on the developer list.

Application

Apply now. The deadline for applications is June 28, 2019 at 18:00 UTC.

(See the timeline for further details.)

Project Goals

Our goal for GSoD is to make it easy for new users to analyze their data. We want to accomplish this goal by

1. providing a quick introduction to the essentials of using MDAnalysis through (1) overview documentation and (2) tutorials that address common areas of interest of users;
2. connecting the introductory docs to the API docs so that users can easily learn and explore by themselves.

We have listed several possible projects to work on.

We also have a Frequently Asked Questions for GSoD with MDAnalysis, which is being continuously updated.

About MDAnalysis

MDAnalysis is a Python library for the analysis of computer simulations of many-body systems at the molecular scale.

MDAnalysis is also a community of hundreds of users and developers. As a community, we adhere to our Code of Conduct.

Written by scientists for scientists

MDAnalysis is a project written by scientists for scientists and is currently used for cutting edge research around the world. A writer with MDAnalysis will learn about the technical aspects of creating docs for open source code (such as documentation generation with Sphinx, continuous integration-based workflows and distributed development with git via our GitHub source code repository) and also about the science that MDAnalysis enables. Our developers have published many scientific publications that used our library or described innovative new methods that were implemented in MDAnalysis. A writer will interact with these accomplished scientists and learn about the science: How molecules are simulated (e.g., biomolecules such as proteins and DNA or novel materials) and how scientists analyze such simulations in order to better understand the world at the microscopic scale.

More about Projects and MDAnalysis

Our recent post on our GSoD application explains more of the background (What is MDAnalysis and what is it good for?) and summarizes our project ideas.

You can find detailed project ideas on our wiki.

Also read the Frequently Asked Questions for GSoD with MDAnalysis.

Contact us

If you have any questions or if you want to work with us please write to us on the developer list.