Jan and I have been very busy the past several months starting up the Elix project, a library of high-quality web components designed to support the Gold Standard Checklist. Together with developers from Comcast, Vaadin, CommonTime, and Google, we participate in the Elix Core Team with Component Kitchen serving as a host organization for the project.

Much of what Jan and I have written about on this blog up to this point has led to the creation of Elix. Rather than restating what we've said in the past, we'd like to provide some getting-started tips and invite members of the web application development community to contribute to Elix. Elix is just getting off the ground, but there is enough in place to serve as examples and self-documenting guides for helping us continue to make progress.

The Elix site is a great place to start as well as to return to for architectural design overviews and elements/mixins documentation. Also, Jan and I have spoken extensively about Elix, starting with an episode discussing the Gold Standard and following up with a discussion about the Elix project on The Web Platform Podcast earlier this year.

Jan also gave a great presentation at the Web Components Remote Conf which we highly encourage you to watch.

While we are looking forward to working with experienced industry partners, Elix is also a great open source project for those, such as university students, looking to gain their initial experience in web development work, and we extend a particular welcome to these contributors.

Why contribute to the Elix project?

1. Web application and front-end development is a vibrant area of software engineering
2. Web Components, as they become pervasively supported on the major browsers, are a smart architectural approach for building web applications, especially alongside popular frameworks such as React
3. Therefore, this is a great time to invest in building knowledge and expertise in this area
4. Elix is just getting off the ground, so it's also a great way to begin building and extending expertise in Web Components, especially given Elix's focus on native JavaScript with a minimal toolchain
5. With limited early contributors, you can, over time, establish some name recognition in what we hope will become an important industry open source project

There are many ways to get started in building up your understanding and expertise. A few include:

1. Simply reading the documentation and studying, in general, the ideas behind Web Components, progressive web applications, and web application frameworks
2. Reviewing and extending the Elix documentation
3. Building unit tests
4. Building sample/demo progressive web applications that make use of Elix elements
5. Working on existing/new elements and mixins

Any level of invovlement is welcome, and you may find that spending even only an hour a day will soon lead to deep understanding and the ability to make significant contributions to the project.

Take a look at the links, read about Web Components, frameworks such as React, and general progressive web application information. You can clone the Elix GitHub project, read the Elix core team meeting notes, and gear yourself up for involvement. Follow the Elix project on Twitter at @ElixElements.

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