Information for new contributors

[noatamir]

Hi folks,

Welcome! If you are new contributor, here are some links to resources to get you started:

• Contributors documentation
  • Create a development environment for working on pandas
  • Contributing to the documentation
  • Contributing to the codebase
  • Helping with issue triage

Please also consider joining our contributors' community, where folks connect with each to resolve issues and discuss ongoing work.

If something isn't clear, or doesn't go smoothly, then you can ask in our contributors' community or raise an issue.

As we continue to evolve contributing to pandas, you can check back here for updates in the list below. Thank you for being a part of pandas!

Recent updates:

• 2026.02.12: Creating a development environment and installing pandas using setup.py has been removed. Please follow the Meson instructions instead.
• 2026.01.27: We have added an AI contribution policy to our contributors documentation. If you plan to use AI to assist in issue triage or pull requests, please follow all the guidelines. Repeated misuse of these tools can result in bans from contributing to pandas.
• 2025.11.07: Gitpod, VSCode, and Docker development environment configurations were removed. These development environment setups were no longer maintained. You can refer to the configurations on the 2.3.x branch if you would still like to use these setups.
• 2025.10.07: Commenting take on an issue will no longer add you as an assignee to the issue, and the project no longer meaningfully uses the "Assignees" field on an issue. If you are interested in working on an issue, you can leave a comment about your intention to work on it. If there has not been activity in the issue or an associated pull request in weeks, feel free to take over the issue.

[phofl]

@topper-123 this was pinned on purpose (also discussed on our slack, so please don’t remove the pin)

[rhshadrach]

@datapythonista - We'd like to leave this pinned, any objection?

[datapythonista]

Ah, sorry, I think I probably confused this with a github popup or something. No familiar with pinned issues, I see on the history that I unpined it, but not that I planned to unpin anything for others.

[Raghav-Bell]

I can help in adding this info as contribution guideline.