1,000% yes. There are so many ways to contribute to our community.

When in doubt, we recommend going together! Get connected with our community of active

contributors, many of whom felt just like you when they started out and are happy to welcome

you and support you as you get to know how we work, and where things are. Take a look at the

next section to learn more.

Get Connected

The incubator is our non-public communication channel for new contributors. It is

a private gitter room moderated by core Matplotlib developers where you can

get guidance and support for your first few PRs. It's a place you can ask questions

about anything: how to use git, github, how our PR review process works, technical questions

about the code, what makes for good documentation or a blog post, how to get involved involved

in community work, or get "pre-review" on your PR.

To join, please go to our public `gitter <https://gitter.im/matplotlib/matplotlib>`_ community

channel, and ask to be added to '#incubator'. One of our core developers will see your message

and will add you.

Once a month, we host a meeting to discuss topics that interest new contributors. Anyone can attend,

present, or sit in and listen to the call. Among our attendees are fellow new contributors, as well

as maintainers, and veteran contributors, who are keen to support onboarding of new folks and share

their experience. You can find our community calendar link at the `Scientific Python website

<https://scientific-python.org/calendars/>`_, and you can browse previous meeting notes on `github

<https://github.com/matplotlib/ProjectManagement/tree/master/new_contributor_meeting>`_. We recommend

joining the meeting to clarify any doubts, or lingering questions you might have, and to get to know a few

of the people behind the GitHub handles 😉. You can reach out to @noatamir on `gitter

<https://gitter.im/matplotlib/matplotlib>`_. For any clarifications or suggestions. We <3 feedback!

`good first issue <https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/labels/good%20first%20issue>`_

These are well documented issues, that do not require a deep understanding of

the internals of Matplotlib. The issues may additionally be tagged with a

difficulty. ``Difficulty: Easy`` is suited for people with little Python experience.

``Difficulty: Medium`` and ``Difficulty: Hard`` require more programming experience.

This could be for a variety of reasons, among them, though not necessarily all at

the same time:

exploration, making suggestions, or follow-up discussions to clarify a good path

to resolve the issue.