Onboarding process

[henriqueweege]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The problem is that I'm trying to understand how Avalonia works in a code level, but I'm unable to find enough documentation to help myself (although there are docs explaining Avalonia in a more broad way).

Describe the solution you'd like
I think that would be wonderful for the community as a whole to have some kind of onboarding process. This process would help to understand how the platform works, and as a result, new contributors would need less time to understand how the platform works, and would be less prone to make mistakes when contributing.

Describe alternatives you've considered
A document explaining what are the main parts of the solution and how they interact with each other, using C4 architecture model is a good way of do it. I know that writing documents is time consuming (and boring), so if someone that have the know-how of the platform is willing to teach me how it works, I am down to write it.
Another option would be to have some sort of video series explaining Avalonia in a code level.

Additional context
Example of questions that come into my mind when I look into Avalonia solution: What is the "_build" project, and what is it responsible for? Which layers does the application have?
P.S.: Extend the first question to all projects, and having all that knowledge will enable me to put my dirty fingers into bugs, and kill them by coding more bugs (please don't roast me, it is just a joke haha).

Special thanks to @timunie and @stevemonaco for all the attention, time and care in this conversation.

[maxkatz6]

It's a great topic, as right now developers can learn internal structure only with a trial and error approach. While we have top-level architecture information, as well as build instructions, it doesn't really cover everything.

Full code documentation is something that you would find more often on enterprise projects to simplify onboarding. But in open source, there is no really formal onboarding usually. I wonder if there are existing open-source projects that solved this problem and can be used as an example.

[maxkatz6]

I also can mention that we often have public discussions for feature designs. That can be used as a documentation. But normally it's not well structured together (you need to search github to find them per feature), sometimes not up tod date, or something do not even exist.

Some examples:

• how GPU interop works [SPEC] External GPU memory interop (OpenGL, Vulkan, DirectX) #9925
• theme dictionaries ThemeDictionary + ThemeVariantScope #8166 (partially was moved to documentation, but this PR has more internal specifications)
• file picker File picker and bookmarks API #8303

[henriqueweege]

@maxkatz6 Hi Max!

First of all, thank you for all the links, I will look into them asap.
Because I had just worked on companies, I think makes sense that I am looking for onboarding haha. I had started looking into open source projects in the mid of last month, and I don't remember that they had something like that. To be honest, I am specially interested to contribute with Avalonia because of the community that this project have, and something like onboarding will be one more point to attract people like me, that have enterprise background and wish to contribute, but need things a little more "chewed" (specially to save time).
As I said before, I know takes time to write something like that, and I am down to do it, just need someone to explain how the solution works.

[timunie]

@henriqueweege for quick questions you can also join us on telegram (https://t.me/Avalonia)