The purpose of this chapter is to provide beginning Hackystat developers with an overview of the way things work and the resources that are available in the Hackystat development community. As this chapter is being written by an experienced Hackystat developer, it is bound to omit lots of information that would help bring new developers up to speed more quickly. Please feel free to send your contributions for inclusion (or, as you get more experienced, simply edit this chapter yourself!)

In a sense, there are two flavors of Hackystat developers: internal and external. Internal Hackystat developers are those who work on the public Hackystat modules. External Hackystat developers are those who work on private or third party modules not maintained in the public Hackystat repository. Most Hackystat developers start out as "external" developers, and while many stay that way, others might choose to donate their modules to the public Hackystat repository at some point in time, and thus transition to becoming an internal Hackystat developer.

Most of the following material applies equally well to internal and external developers, but we will make the distinction where appropriate.