[Biopython] Getting involved

[Peter]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 3:46 PM, Dragoslav Zaric
<zaricdragoslav at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear friends,
>
> I will first introduce myself. My name is Dragoslav Zaric, I am from
> country Serbia, capital city Belgrade. I am currently located in Abu
> Dhabi, UAE, working as professional programmer. I have Master
> degree in Astrophysics and I work as professional programmer
> for more than 3 years.

Hello Dragoslav,

> I am not in the Bioinformatics field, but I have enough interest,
> energy and will to contribute.
>
> I have read biopython manual, so I have good idea and overview of
> biopython framework.
> Also I have good knowledge of python and django framework.
>
> I wanna start contribute to biopython project so can you tell me is
> there some planned work to be done ?
>
> At first I can get involved in programming tasks that are not totally
> related to genetics, like parsing of files, accessing databases ...

There are lots of things people are working on part time, e.g.
http://biopython.org/wiki/Active_projects

There may be some easy to solve open bugs/enhancements
on bugzilla,
http://bugzilla.open-bio.org/buglist.cgi?product=Biopython&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED

You could also look at the (unfunded) Google Summer of Code
project ideas - although those tend to be larger pieces of work.

I would normally recommend you work on something directly
useful to the biology you are working on. Clearly that does not
apply here. I guess you want to do Python coding as a hobby?

Can you program in C and are you familiar with the C/Python
API? We will need to look at porting our C code from Python 2
to Python 3, and this is quite complicated.

> Also I have started to read AMAZING book on NCBI site and after
> finishing this book I am sure I can start to work on genetic problems
> in biopython. This is the book:
>
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bookshelf/br.fcgi?book=genomes
>
> This also gave me idea how to start to contribute to biopython. Does
> biopython have module just for searching NCBI bookshelf and books,
> like library module ?? Maybe I can start to work on this module ??

I think you can use the NCBI Entrez API here with "Books" as the
database (see Biopython module Bio.Entrez). You could try this,
and maybe write a cookbook example for our wiki.

Kind regards,

Peter