Contributing

Development environment

The project uses a Dev Container. Open the repository in VS Code or JetBrains and accept the “Reopen in Container” prompt. This sets up Deno, Node, PostgreSQL, Redpanda, and all dependencies automatically.

Code standards

• TypeScript everywhere: Deno for backend, Vite and React for frontend.
• No comments in code: the codebase should be self-documenting. Exceptions: biome-ignore and eslint-disable directives.
• Functional where possible: pure functions with explicit inputs and outputs over mutable module-level state.
• Single source of truth: shared types in backend/src/types/, shared utilities in backend/src/lib/, shared frontend utilities in frontend/src/utils/.
• Import map aliases: use @veta/http, @veta/messaging, @veta/types/orders etc. instead of relative paths like ../lib/http.ts.

Pre-commit hooks

The pre-commit hook runs 9 checks automatically:

1. Verify clean working directory.
2. Backend lint (deno lint).
3. Backend type-check (deno task check).
4. Backend unit tests (deno task test).
5. Frontend lint (Biome).
6. Frontend type-check (tsc).
7. Frontend unit tests (Vitest).
8. Smoke tests (auto-skipped if local services are not running).
9. Integration tests (auto-skipped if local services are not running).

You cannot push until all checks pass.

Commit messages

Follow Conventional Commits:

feat(risk): add pre-trade risk-engine with fat-finger checks
fix(ci): wait for risk-engine prices before integration tests
refactor: consolidate shared types across 29 files
docs(personas): document trading styles and desk segregation
test(replay): add unit tests for session replay panel

Pull requests

• Release Please auto-generates version bumps and changelogs.
• Dependabot auto-merges patch-level dependency updates.
• CI must be green before merge (integration tests are continue-on-error for known flaky strategies).
• Screenshots are automated, not manual: CI captures the full UI suite on every PR and posts a 📸 UI screenshots comment showing what changed against the committed baseline. Verify a UI-affecting change in a running instance of the app yourself first; do not rely on unit tests alone to confirm layout or visual behaviour. See CI/CD Pipeline for how screenshot capture and diffing work.

Documentation standards

• Use British English spelling and grammar.
• Use a professional, direct tone. Avoid conversational or jovial phrasing.
• Do not use em-dashes (—). Replace with commas, periods, or restructure the sentence.
• Mark key documents with a leading star in curated document lists.
• Do not use ASCII-art diagrams; use mermaid (graph LR / graph TD) rendered by the mermaid integration in astro.config.mjs.

Contributors

VETA is built by a small team of humans and AI assistants. Each contributor below has had a substantive role in shaping the codebase.

Miles Burton

Founder, lead engineer, and product owner. Designed the platform’s architecture, runs the production deployment, and reviews every change before merge. Contact: mail@milesburton.com.

Claude (Anthropic)

AI pair programmer used for documentation, devcontainer infrastructure, refactoring, and test scaffolding. Frequent contributor to the docs site, the testing taxonomy, and incremental backend changes. Used via the Claude Code CLI inside the dev container.

Codex (OpenAI)

AI assistant used for targeted code generation, particularly in the frontend Redux slices and React component layers. Used through the VS Code extension.

GitHub Copilot

AI completion assistant used for inline code suggestions across both the backend Deno code and the frontend React/Vitest test files. Particularly useful for boilerplate test setup and Zod schema definitions.

nVidia Spark (DeepSeek R1)

AI reasoning model used for architecture review, complex refactor planning, and reviewing risk-engine logic. Accessed via the nVidia Spark interface.

Each AI assistant’s contributions are attributed in commit messages with a Co-Authored-By trailer. Humans retain final review authority on all merges to main.