Bitcoin source - how to start helping, what are the rules?

[ThePiachu]

I`ve thought about trying to understand what is going on where in the Bitcoin source code, and I figured I could do this and contribute to the development a bit at the same time.

Is there some list of small things that would be welcome in the source code, like more comments, clearer variable names and so forth that one could try working on, or should I keep away from such non-constructive behaviour?

Is there some list of guidelines one should follow when wanting to contribute to Bitcoin code (like formatting and naming guidelines)?

[weex]

I've not touched the Bitcoin source code but you could start by looking at the issues at github and start testing some of them. Testing and documentation tend to be good places to start on a new free software codebase.

[laanwj]

Agreed, the greatest help right now would be people that test and/or fix bugs.

Apart from that, if you want to work on the GUI code let me know I have quite a list of TODO issues.

(like formatting and naming guidelines)?

see doc/coding.txt