I've seen numerous requests around 'how do I get started' with Atlas and Open Metadata. Here's a suggest path:
Learn
Want to find out
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There are many ways to get involved with the project:
Learn
A good starting point is the introduction to Open Metadata as this sets out what we are trying to achieve
Discuss
The most important aspect of any Apache project is collaboration, so an essential starting point is to join the relevant Atlas mailing lists
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This can be fairly technical so we also now have a "user" mailing list which is ideal for newbies to the project or those who want to avoid the technical details about Atlas's implementation and just focus on using Atlas to deliver business value
There are My favourite way of reading the lists is now with another apache project Pony Mail - go to http://lists.apache.org to start, login via google or apache, and browse/contribute to the lists. There are also replicas of these lists available via gmane.org, but this is not supported by Apache, and the site itself has been in somewhat of a flux recently. If interested go to "news.nntp.org" in a newsreader such as Thunderbird and search for groups under "gmane.comp.apache.incubator.atlas" Note that these mailing lists will be renamed in the coming weeks/months to support the graduation of Atlas to a top level project(the Ranger lists are there too)
Finally when interacting with the mailing list, note that the EZLM mailing list server doesn't support all mail formats. In particular it has a dislike to HTML only email, so try to send a plain text (text/plain) or at least in multipart. Generally gmail, outlook, lotus notes, Apple mail all seem fine, but IBM verse will fail and posts simply get ignored as they are not posted.
We also have ongoing calls on a few topics – if you're interested please ask on the mailing list.
Do: Write, design, code, test
The Atlas JIRA is where issues are tracked. A new issue can be opened if you find a bug or hit a problem with Atlas, and this is also one way - in addition to the list - of finding out what code changes are being proposed or going in. Any design discussions will probably be oriented around a specific JIRA and may link to locations on this wiki, include design docs etc. No permission is needed to open a JIRA account, but if you wish to assign an issue to yourself to work on, please ask in the dev list for contributor authority.
The wiki mentioned above is also something anyone can contribute to - again, open a apache wiki account & ask on the mailing lists for authority to update Atlas pages.
Source code for Atlas is managed in git. Patches can be contributed via jira
The Atlas source code can be found