I'd like to contribute!

[drowzy]

Hi!
First of all this is a very interesting project!
And I'd like to help out!

It's however a little unclear where efforts are best spent to move the project forward. What's already in progress etc. There are some open issues, I looked a little bit at #29. But couldn't find a reference to it in the cloudstate docs or an example client so I'm looking for a bit of guidance on how to get started, so any examples, docs I might have missed are much appreciated!

[marcellanz]

Hi @drowzy👋, thanks for you interest to contribute. We're at a phase where multiple things happen on different places, but our focus is on the so called service proxy to be implemented which is right the repository you just openend this issue. Depending on your interests, there is a wide range of topics we're working on. From new or to be enhanced Language SDKs to state models and also the deployment story.

If you like to start about where we're coming from, what the vision is and to get an overview I'd recomment the following links to have a read:

https://eigr.io/docs/history/ – to get a glimpse about the history
https://cloudstate.io/ – go get an overview about the motivation that led to cloudstate initially. We'll have our own vision document on eigr.io, but for now motivation and vision match quite good with what we're aiming at.
https://eigr.io/docs/projects-functions/eigr-massa/ – about how to start our service proxy

and then if you like to dive technically have a look into the "protocol" that we're based on so far:
https://eigr.io/protodocs/cloudstate/entity.proto/
https://github.com/eigr/massa/tree/master/apps/cloudstate_protocol/priv/protos

We're also on discord, if you don't mind you can jump over. You can find an invitation link on the left footer of the https://eigr.io/ site.

[sleipnir]

Hello @drowzy
I am very happy to hear that you are interested in these things, we are very happy to have you as a contributor.

I agree with you that things are not clear, so let me see what a step by step would be like to get you started.

• First it would be interesting for you to subscribe to our server at Discord, there we can exchange some ideas about everything related to the project in a more dynamic way.
• Second, read our documentation, especially the part about the history of Cloudstate.
• Afterwards it would be interesting to take a closer look at the protocol, this can be done by taking a look at the protobufs files and reading their comments.
• Also try to keep an eye out here.

I think this will give you a basic overview.

You also thought correctly that implementing an entity type like ValueEntity would be a good way to go but all persistent entities still need some persistence abstractions that don't exist yet so it would be a long way to go to implement a persistent entity type. If you feel better you can start by finishing the implementation for stateless entities which we call the Action entity, there is already a good job done there that you could continue if you wish.

If you're interested take a look here and let me know if you want to do this, otherwise we can discuss other things to get you started.

[sleipnir]

Sorry @marcellanz I didn't see your answer until I sent mine, but I think we complement each other.
Have fun @drowzy

[marcellanz]

@sleipnir no worries :) reading your and mine comment confirms and shows that we have a consistent view of what we're doing, which is great.

[drowzy]

@sleipnir @marcellanz Thanks for clarification, the links and the explanation. I'll read through it and join the discord server and we can take it from there 😄!