[Bf-committers] How to start develop Blender

[Ágoston Princz]

Hi Blender Developers,

I'm new to developing Blender but I have a long history of scripting in
python (mainly for Maya and Nuke). I have lot of idea to make Blender even
better and I realized the "simpliest" solution the achive these ideas if I
do it my self.

But how should I start?

I think the Blender community have to do better to attract people to the
develpoment process. Let's see how it looks to an outsider.
If we start with google "how to start develop blender", there won't be any
precise hit about the topic. We can find:

https://www.blender.org/get-involved/developers/
and
https://www.youtube.com/user/BlenderCoders/videos

Unfortunatelly the old wiki has gone so that page:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Dev:Doc/New_Developer_Info
is also unavailable. I remeber I looked up that page couple of times
before, but than I left it becoase I felt it was too high for me...

On the Blender Developers youTube channel there are plenty of videos about
the current development, but I did not find any about how to start.

Maybe it sould be a topic of a discussion. I think there shoud be a
documentation for new developers start with the very-very begining. I mean
there are lot of topics obvious for an experienced developer but very-very
vauge for a beginner.
For me a start package should have answer questions like below (kind of a
FAQ block):

*What does Blender development means?*
How it is happeining in the real life? Who are the main developers? Why we
call them main developers? How can you be a main developer? How development
ideas are concieved? Who are responsible for ideas? What is the roadmap?
Who are responsible to implement the ideas? How your ideas can be
published? How can you join to implement existing ideas?

*What kind of knowledge you have to have to start?*
Is it important math an physics? And if it is which areas of math an
physics? Which areas of Blender development involves math and physics, and
which areas definitelly does not involve those. Which is the minimum level
to start develop Blender?
What kind of programming knowledge you have to have to start develop
Blender? What if you have no experience with C or C++? What if you have no
experience in Python?

*What is the process to achive an idea in Blender?*
Everybody has a lot of feature request, but there should be production
examples from the past, how (simple) features was implemented
(step-by-step).
What is the main difference to create an add-on and develop the software?
Pros and cons.
What can be achieved with add-ons and what is not and why?

*How can you be a good developer?*
Of course software development as everything else needs a lot of practice,
but what are the key areas to focus on?

Internet is so overloaded with information so really need to have an clear
guide step by step guide for beginners.
Interviews with current developers: how they started? What they knew about
Blender and programming (and maths and physics) at the beginning?

And it would be really nice to have not only documentation, but video
tutorials. I follow Blender stuff since the Gooseberry Project and I only
found one developer video since than:
https://youtu.be/opl4Y7DfxR4

There is a site called Scratch a Pixel which is an excellent example of
what I'm talking about.
http://www.scratchapixel.com/



Cheers

-- 
Ágoston Princz