Diagram for new devs to get to know the detectron2 project

[ivanmilevtues]

Hi all,

I am Ivan a developer, who loves using open source software and I would also like to contribute to it. However I often find myself intimidated by the existing codebase. I really want to help the process of getting to know codebases, I would love to hear what is your take and process on on-boarding people to new code bases is. I can imagine as Facebook (META) is a big corporation people might have insights on the process or just in general what you personally like to do.

Thus said we think that diagrams are the way to go, we generated one for the detectron2 repository -
https://github.com/CodeBoarding/GeneratedOnBoardings/blob/main/detectron2/on_boarding.md

I would love to hear your opinion on the diagram, what is your oponion on diagrams and onboarding in general. If you are interested and liek the diagram we can also open a PR with all the docs.

Full disclosure: we're trying to turn this into a startup, but we're still in a very early stage and figuring out what will actually be useful for people.

If you are interested do not hesitate to get in touch with me :)

[Vishnu8299]

Hi Ivan,

Thanks for sharing this — I really appreciate your openness and the initiative to tackle such a real challenge in the open-source and developer community!

Onboarding into large or unfamiliar codebases can definitely feel intimidating, even for experienced developers. Your approach using diagrams as an entry point is spot on. Visuals can make complex systems more digestible and help contributors understand the flow of data, responsibilities of modules, and how components interact — without diving deep into every line of code right away.

I checked out the [Detectron2 onboarding diagram](https://github.com/CodeBoarding/GeneratedOnBoardings/blob/main/detectron2/on_boarding.md) — and I have to say it’s really promising. It gives a great bird’s-eye view and could serve as an essential part of any contributor’s first steps. Something like this, combined with clean README files and code comments, can dramatically lower the barrier to entry.

A few thoughts/suggestions:

• You might consider offering diagrams in different levels of detail (e.g., “high-level architecture”, “data flow”, “module interactions”).
• Interactive or clickable diagrams could be even more powerful.
• Providing these as optional docs via a PR (as you mentioned) is a great non-intrusive way to contribute value.

If you decide to open a PR for this, I’d definitely support it — tools that make open source more accessible are always welcome.

Also, best of luck with your startup journey! The problem you’re trying to solve is absolutely real, and solving it well could have a meaningful impact on dev communities everywhere.

Let’s keep in touch 👏

[ivanmilevtues]

Thanks for the nice comment. I really appreaciate the nice comments. I will definetly open a PR. The point you made where the clickable diagram could be more powerful, unsure if you saw that the sent diagram actually has clickable elements. We also can generate deeper levels, but still experimenting with that :)