MDAnalysis Technical Writer Cover Letter

Dear MDAnalysis core team,

My name is Egor Marin. You might remember me from the Google Summer of Code 2023 program, where I contributed “Parallelization for AnalysisBase” and presented it later at the UGM 2023. I’m writing this to support my application to the MDAnalysis Technical Writer posting, communicated to me earlier via email.

As for my technical and scientific experience, I was a scientific journalist for a year, and following that, wrote a few publications for scientific journals like Nature Communications and JACS, and fully coordinated writing manuscripts for others, such as JCIM. Apart from that, I’ve worked a lot with GitHub both inside and outside work, and open-source, including projects such as reciprocalspaceship and MDAnalysis. As an example, you can view summaries of the papers that I contributed to here. My most significant open-source contribution is, of course, MDAnalysis’s PR4162, and its respective documentation.

I understand that clear documentation and user guides are crucial for an open-source project, since they provide self-sufficient entry points for new users, and ultimately serve as the most effective tool for growing the user base. I can clearly see that currently, the documentation of MDAnalysis doesn’t match that of more mature projects, while the importance of the library for the structural biology community is significant.

Hence, I want to contribute towards MDAnalysis having clear and concise documentation, where you can find things without asking Google for it. I know how to work with open-source infrastructure, have the necessary domain knowledge, good experience with scientific texts, and an innate desire to organize things.

I would be happy to further discuss the project, whenever possible.

Best, Egor Marin