Contribution Guide¶

This guide offers general tips to be followed when writing articles for LLM Seminar Series. Make sure to read it before opening a PR.

How to start?¶

The homepage outlines the topics which are related to each other and can be covered in a single session.
A session is generally divided into multiple parts. For example, the first session was an introductory session and thus it was divided in 3 parts,
1. Emergence of LLMs
2. Building blocks of LLMs
3. Overview of landscape of LLMs.
We would like to have a detailed article about each part.

Please go through the homepage and choose a topic of your interest.
It can be something which you have already used in the past or it can be something you want to learn next.
Following order is not mandatory, e.g., you can pick the last topic first too.

As soon as you decide the topic of your interest, create a github issue here.
Once you create an issue, we will start sharing some useful references and also provide guidance for writing the perfect article.
It also helps collaborating on same topic if multiple people are interested by discussing on the same github issue.

We recommend using github from day saving your progress.
We follow fork and pull request workflow since its a collaborative project as described in the below image.
In summary,
- you should first fork this repo,
- create a new branch and add your commits in your branch,
- once you are ready to submit an article; create a pull request.
The detailed steps can be found here: Contributing to a project

We prefer a single markdown file for each article, but you can also submit a jupyter notebook.
Put new articles under the following dir:
- llm_seminar_series/session_<session_number>/part_<part_number>_<part_name>/README.md or llm_seminar_series/session_<session_number>/part_<part_number>_<part_name>/<topic_name>.ipynb
- Where session_number can be found from the homepage, while part_number can be inferred from the outline of the session.
If the article uses any additional source files, then put them along the main file. For example, check RLHF.ipynb.

Maintaining a consistent style across all the articles provides a good reading experience to our readers and often reduces review time.
We have provided code and text style guides separately here.
You can refer them when crafting that perfect article.
Please use the following commands,
- Install ruff: pip install -r requirements.txt
- Run auto formatter: ruff format
- Run linter and fix remaining issues manually ruff check

We use mkdocs to host our repo as a static website.
All the articles will be automatically rendered to an html page once merged to main branch.
But you can also host this website locally on your machine to visualize the final output which helps solving any formatting issues.
Follow these commands to start a local server
- Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install all the dependencies.
- Run mkdocs serve to serve this website locally.
- You will get this message on your terminal Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000/ from where you can access it.
- Changes you make in the markdown are reflected immediately on the website which can help you quickly correct any formatting issues.

Once you are happy with your article, just raise the PR as suggested in step 3.
Maintainers of this repo will review the changes and guide you for any modifications if required.
Once the PR is approved and merged into main branch, it will be live at the website, Congratulations 🎉.

While reading is still the best way to learn something, many prefer watching explanatory videos.
We encourage every author to conduct a Youtube Live Session to walk us through the topic using the same article.
The link to this video will be put along with the article for future visitors.
While live streams are good for interacting with the audience and conduct Q&A, if you prefer to submit a prerecorded video then it's perfectly fine too.

Tip

Maintainers of these repo will reach out to you with more details once your article is live.