Introducing our group

[NariaReynhard]

Hello, I'm here to introduce my group.

We're a team of 5 students at Blagnac's IUT in France in third year. We've been assigned as our year project to contribute to this project.

You might hear quite a lot of us during the next few months as we'll do our best for our contribution to leave a good mark on the project, so we'll often come to the community in order ask questions to make sure we're on the good track.

We're open to discussion and I'll start by asking something, we just started our year and our project, so do you have any recommendations on where we could start to help so we can get to know the project and the languages used without frying our brains right away ?

Thank you in advance for your help and we hope to leave a good trace on the project while making a good memory for us.

[matkoniecz]

Hello, I'm here to introduce my group.

Hello, and welcome!

so do you have any recommendations on where we could start to help so we can get to know the project and the languages used without frying our brains right away ?

I would recommend starting from using the app a bit - and familiarising yourself with what OpenStreetMap is. And explore OpenStreetMap data model (nodes, tags etc)

That should make easier to understand what is going on and maybe you will spot something confusing/unclear. The app is supposed to be usable by people new to OpenStreetMap, so if you try using and are stuck/confused then it is worth opening an issue, even if you are unsure about fix. And maybe it will be relatively easy to fix.

Next step would be probably setting up Android Studio. It is a chore to setup first time and will probably take a while. I remember that it took a bit research for me to get it working.
Here sign of success would be getting app running in emulator (without changes done to it, just unmodified app running on your computer).
If you are stuck you can ask for help, but Android Studio is used so widely that resources/answers how to unstuck are almost always available.

#6132 and #5486 are a bit interesting - as currently it is requiring non-code contributions. Research on parcel lockers / taking pictures of roads with specific surface respectively.
If you can take pictures (or find freely licensed ones) to fill missing spaces at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:smoothness/Gallery you can propose them at https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/how-to-map-key-smoothness/109860/ And yes, it is contributing to this project! And yes, you can do a cycling trip hunting for surface pictures and validly describe it as contributing to open-source project.
Other non-code contribution could be help with translating if you know English and some other language: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#translating-the-app

I quickly looked through issues and sadly do not see a perfect fit for people new both to OSM and StreetComplete and Kotlin. But something can be found, or trickier one can be attempted. You can also look through https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues to find something that is understandable and does not look like requiring months of work. Maybe @mnalis has suggestion for some nice one.

languages used without frying our brains right away ?

Kotlin has quite nice tutorials/docs.
I guess that if you figure out Compose you could help with #5421

[matkoniecz]

if anything in that message was unclear - let me know and I will try to explain it better

and BTW, https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md seems quite nice (hopefully! if something is unclear to new contributors there it would be also worth commenting here)

[FloEdelmann]

Some easy new quest ideas are listed in

• Easy quest ideas #6457

[matkoniecz]

though I would recommend to first make "quest suggestion" issue - some may have tricky parts like that cave one

[NariaReynhard]

Hello, thanks for the feedbacks !

After some discussions among our group and consideration of what has been suggested, we'll take a few days to do a not related project so we can get familiar with Kotlin for instance. We'll probably start looking into quest to implement around the end of the coming week, we'll look into what you suggested at this moment.

[westnordost]

Hey @NariaReynhard!

Cool that you want to help with this project! Let's focus on not frying the brains first!

I'll tell you a bit about the environment of this project. In the order of importance:

1. Kotlin as programming language. Obviously, you need to read into how to use this language. It's a bit like Java, but is not that strictly object oriented and leans more into functional programming, in general it is somewhat less verbose to write, which however might come at the cost of making the code harder to read for those not well versed in the language. I recommend looking in the Kotlin documentation for getting started guides, tutorials etc.. I strongly recommend you use some IDE to do Kotlin / Android programming, such as Android Studio or IntelliJ in general, which means you should get familiar with this IDE, too.

2. We are using Kotlin multiplatform. I.e., it's still Kotlin, but the project is set up in a way to allow (in the future) to deploy to various platforms, e.g. iOS or eventually Linux (phones). Android-specific code is in a different directory as common code, etc.. We are in the process of migrating the code bit by bit away from Android to multiplatform (i.e. common) code. For example, a semi big thing to do is to use a multiplatform library to access the local database instead of the built-in functions of the Android framework to do that. The master-ticket to migrate the app to Kotlin Multiplatform is iOS - Planning #5421, if you want to know more.

3. So far, this is an Android app. Especially the majority of the UI of the app is still written in Android views, which is a DOM-based UI (using those layout XMLs, then controlling the view from Fragments). We are in the process of recreating those views in the UI framework Compose Multiplatform (which is multiplatform, i.e. not Android-specific). This is a very different approach to UI programming, it's rather declarative / reactive. (You could read up about this in general, to understand the foundational differences between DOM-based UI programming and the reactive/declarative approach)

4. Now, of course, this is not just any app, but an app specifically to edit OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Especially if you intend to for example contribute your very own quests, then it makes sense to look a bit into how OpenStreetMap works on a technical level (data structure, API, ...) and the documentation of what can be tagged. Specifically if you think about contributing a quest, take note of the quest guidelines of what can/should be added to the app, and what not.

The general areas where you could contribute would be

• addition of new quests (or even overlays) and/or improvements thereof. This might be interesting for you if you are interested in OpenStreetMap in general. This is also something @paulklie has been very active and successful in recently (maybe he'd be willing to guide you a bit, but don't count on it, he is a voluntary contributor like anyone else).

• helping with the migration (read: re-creation) of the UI to Compose Multiplatform. (Master-ticket: Migrate to Maplibre-Compose #6072)

• helping with the migration of non-UI code to Kotlin Multiplatform. This does not require knowledge of any UI framework, but of Kotlin + Kotlin Multiplatform, maybe a bit of iOS.

• various things: bugfixes, small improvements etc...

but anyway, for now, I think it's better to first focus on the learning part, and not to overload yourself with too many new things at once. You could, for example, if your project adviser allows, first set a target to create some (trivial) Android or even better Multiplatform (iOS, Android) App written in Kotlin following various online tutorials to gain a bunch of knowledge.

[NariaReynhard]

Thanks for your time, we carefully considered what you said and asked our project adviser if we could make a simple not related app to train ourselves. Since it has been accepted, we're going to focus our efforts during a few days on this.

Your input is very valuable and we'll make sure to keep that in mind during our time here.

Thanks again !