Documentation for New Developers

I think we should have some doc pages targetting new contributors.

I was once talking with @s4chin and he had a very simple question “How do I understand mitmproxy’s codebase? It’s huge and I have no idea where to start.”

Understanding new codebases isn’t an easy task, but we can surely tell people where to start.

Some contents (off the top of my head):

• The Hacking & Testing section from the Readme
• Describe the basic folder structure
  • what is where
  • what are netlib/pathoc etc.
  • how they fit into mitmproxy
• ‘Suggested/Further Readings’ for topics like HTTP/2 etc.
  • There are a lot of people who just know python and want to contribute to open source projects but may not know all the advanced networking topics involved.
  • I didn’t understand 70% of what is on the How mitmproxy works when I read it for the first time.

Some of the files already have a top-level docstring. Extending this to every file would be great.

Thoughts?

---

Seeing Anaconda’s Developer Docs finally made me open this issue.

[Sauron754]

As a newomer myself I am experiencing a big difficulty in understanding mimtproxy. For me the biggest problem is to understand the module structures. I think it would really help if there were a module-tree documentation (Maybe there is already one somewhere but I am just too incompetent to find it). There is a very big posibility that a lot of new contributers would come if you explain the code structures of mitmproxy and therefore make the entry for newcomers easier.

[dufferzafar]

Something similar: Guido and others are working on a guided tour to CPython’s source code. (see discussion)