How can I be useful in this community?

[adiazubierna]

Hello to everyone,

I have been using FreeCAD for some years now and I would love to put my two cents in to improve this project and to participate in this community.

I'm asking for your help to see where and how I can be useful. I have about 3-5 hours every week that I can spend.

To have a better picture of my profile to find a good way to be useful, I am a mechanical engineer, using almost every day at work commercial CAD softwares for design.

Thank you all (:

[chrisb]

One thing you can immediately start with: improve/add to the documentation.
Beyond, what would you like to do? It is not a sin to have fun while doing something beneficial to the project.

[NewJoker]

Do you have any coding experience ? Such help would be most appreciated. Otherwise, you could assist with some questions about machine design and technical drawings (TechDraw module is under constant development and support from more people knowing the rules of engineering graphics would be nice). You could share your ideas for the improvement of FreeCAD (based on your experience with commercial software). If you have any models of interesting machines that you can show here, there's a "User Showcase" subforum and screenshots are used also for FreeCAD's website and splash screen changed with each version. Even better if you can share the models in that subforum or grabcad for other users to learn. YouTube tutorials would be great too. Also, there's a constant need for help with wiki documentation and translations. As you can see, there are lots of ways to participate in this community.

[adiazubierna]

Thank you for your feedback.

About the coding, I have only really basic knowleadge. It's somethin that I would like to improve, but for now I don't think I can be really usefull.

Assist with some questions/ideas about machine design and drawings is something that I can do using my own work esperiences. Also improving the documentation in those areas sounds like a good idea where I can help.

About the sharing some models sadly I don't have any rellevant model designed in FreeCAD because I mostly worked on a personal very small projects and trying to "replicate" my work with FreeCAD to prove that is possible to use FreeCAD in a commercial way (not for now... But I have the confidence that sooner than later).

Also, about the YouTube tutorials might be an option. Do you think that tutorials with ono voice (I don't have a really radio voice and English is not my first language) would be usefull? Or should I put my efforts for now on giving ideas / documentation / translation... ?

[NewJoker]

Also, about the YouTube tutorials might be an option. Do you think that tutorials with ono voice (I don't have a really radio voice and English is not my first language) would be usefull? Or should I put my efforts for now on giving ideas / documentation / translation... ?

You could make some video tutorials without commentary, maybe add subtitles but people will likely complain about this. I would rather focus on the wiki documentation and translations.

[adiazubierna]

Is there any TODO list or priorities for documentations and translations or should I take a look myself and decide where to start by myself?

[openBrain]

Another useful activity is to help triaging bugs by trying to reproduce them with latest version in order to check if they are still valid.

[adrianinsaval]

also building and testing PRs that peak your interest and then reporting if they have any issues or work as expected. I've done a good deal of that lately and I'm told it's been very useful.