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Contributor roadmap

This roadmap organizes active contribution opportunities by difficulty and time commitment, so you can find a task that fits your interests and schedule.

Every task listed below is a genuine, verified need in the project.

New here? Start with the First Contribution Guide first!

Claim before you build

Comment on the issue to claim it before opening a PR so multiple contributors don't duplicate work. If you have an idea for a task not listed here, open a thread in GitHub Discussions under Ideas to align with maintainers.

🟢 Level 1: Quick Wins (20–30 minutes)

Ideal for your first PR. These tasks improve documentation, expand test fixtures, or add recipe examples without altering core decision algorithms.

  1. Recipe: DuckDB Parquet Export Recipe
  2. Task: Add a runnable example in examples/integrations/ showing how to clean a partitioned Parquet dataset and write the clean output back to DuckDB.
  3. Labels: good first issue, examples

  4. Files: examples/integrations/

  5. Fixtures: Financial Ledger Sentinel Anomaly

  6. Task: Add a synthetic financial ledger fixture in tests/fixtures/ with localized accounting conventions (e.g. (1,250.00) accounting negatives and EUR prefixes).
  7. Labels: good first issue, fixtures

  8. Files: tests/fixtures/, benchmarks/fixtures/

  9. Docs: Clarify Fallback Matrix Error Codes

  10. Task: Expand docs/fallback-matrix.md with explicit Python error code examples for FallbackError when fallback_policy="error" is triggered.
  11. Labels: good first issue, documentation

  12. Files: docs/fallback-matrix.md

  13. Testing: Missing Sentinel Edge Cases

  14. Task: Add unit tests in tests/test_strings.py covering unicode whitespace characters (e.g. non-breaking space \u00A0, zero-width space \u200B) during sentinel normalization.
  15. Labels: good first issue, testing
  16. Files: tests/test_strings.py

🟡 Level 2: Component Improvements (1–2 hours)

Ideal for contributors comfortable with Python, pandas, and regex who want to implement new features or validators.

  1. Field Validation: International Postal Code Validators
  2. Task: Implement context-aware regex patterns in src/freshdata/fieldcheck.py for UK (SW1A 1AA), Canadian (K1A 0B1), and German (10115) postal codes with unit tests.
  3. Labels: help wanted, validation

  4. Files: src/freshdata/fieldcheck.py, tests/test_fieldcheck.py

  5. Exporter: HTML Stakeholder Summary Card

  6. Task: Build an exporter plugin in src/freshdata/plugins/ that exports CleanReport into a standalone, styled HTML card suitable for embedding in internal dashboards.
  7. Labels: help wanted, plugins, viz

  8. Files: src/freshdata/render/, examples/plugins/

  9. CLI: Add --dry-run Flag to FreshData CLI

  10. Task: Add a --dry-run option to freshdata clean CLI that executes fd.plan() and prints proposed transformations to stdout without writing the output file.
  11. Labels: help wanted, cli

  12. Files: src/freshdata/enterprise/cli.py, tests/test_enterprise_cli.py

  13. Polars: Native Windowed Deduplication Support

  14. Task: Enhance the Polars execution adapter to preserve partition order during duplicate resolution without round-tripping to pandas.
  15. Labels: help wanted, polars, performance
  16. Files: src/freshdata/adapters/polars.py, tests/test_polars_adapter.py

🔴 Level 3: Deep Architecture & Integrations (1+ days)

Substantial features for experienced engineers interested in out-of-core execution, domain packs, or ecosystem integrations.

  1. Domain Pack: Telecommunications (CDR / Network Logs)
  2. Task: Author a new telecom domain validator pack following CONTRIBUTING_DOMAINS.md to validate IMSI, IMEI, Call Detail Records (CDRs), and signal latency telemetry.
  3. Labels: help wanted, domains

  4. Files: src/freshdata/domains/, docs/

  5. Integration: Prefect 3.0 Task & Flow Decorator

    • Task: Implement freshdata.integrations.prefect exposing a @task decorator that cleans task input/output frames and logs trust score telemetry to Prefect Cloud.
    • Labels: help wanted, integrations
    • Files: src/freshdata/integrations/, tests/test_integrations/

  6. Performance: SIMD-Accelerated Sentinel Matching

    • Task: Profile and optimize string sentinel scanning in src/freshdata/steps/sentinels.py on 10M+ row frames using vectorized NumPy boolean operations.
    • Labels: help wanted, performance, benchmarks
    • Files: src/freshdata/steps/, benchmarks/performance/

Contributor Recognition

Every contributor who lands a merged pull request is recognized: * Release Notes: Listed under "Contributors" in the matching GitHub Release and CHANGELOG.md. * Social Spotlight: Highlighted in our bi-weekly Friday community update on LinkedIn and Twitter/X. * All-Contributors: Credited in the repository README.