add preliminary contributing instructions

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -0,0 +1,83 @@
+# Contributing
+
+This page documents our development process.
+
+## 1. Project layout
+
+ - [solarkraft](./solarkraft/) contains the source code of the Solarkraft package
+ - [ContractExamples](./ContractExamples/) contains Soroban smart contracts that we use for testing
+ - [doc](./doc/) contains general documentation
+ - [assets](./assets/) contains project assets such as the project logo
+
+## 2. Solarkraft dev environment
+
+Solarkraft is written in [TypeScript][]. It uses the standard development tooling:
+
+ - [npm][] is the package manager
+ - [tsc][] is the TypeScript compiler
+ - [NodeJS][] is the runtime environment
+ - [MochaJS][] and [ChaiJS][] are the testing framework
+ - [eslint][] is the code linter
+ - [prettier][] is the code formatter
+ - [husky] is the hook manager that runs basic tests on git commits
+
+## 3. Basic development commands
+
+1. On the first run, install the required npm packages:
+
+   ```sh
+   npm i
+   ```
+
+1. Compile the project:
+
+   ```sh
+   npm run compile
+   ```
+
+1. Run the unit tests:
+
+   ```sh
+   npm run test
+   ```
+
+1. Install a local version (once):
+
+   ```sh
+   npm link
+   ```
+
+1. Run the command-line interface:
+
+   ```sh
+   solarkraft
+   ```
+
+## 4. Deployment
+
+We are still discovering an optimal setup. The Soroban instructions are given in
+[#10](https://github.com/freespek/solarkraft/pull/10). Further, Soroban does not
+seem to build well on MacOS, owing to [this
+issue](https://discord.com/channels/1179099813879492721/1196869246429429960/1229764850591469649).
+
+To work around the above problem, we are using [VSCode dev containers][]:
+
+> This simply takes the Rust dev container from Microsoft and installs soroban-cli and the appropriate wasm target.
+>
+> If the quickstart Docker image is run outside the container, its RPC endpoint is available as
+> http://host.docker.internal:8000/soroban/rpc.
+
+Further, see [Dockerfile](.devcontainer/Dockerfile).
+
+
+
+[TypeScript]: https://www.typescriptlang.org/
+[npm]: https://www.npmjs.com/
+[tsc]: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/compiler-options.html
+[NodeJS]: https://nodejs.org/en
+[eslint]: https://eslint.org/
+[prettier]: https://prettier.io/
+[MochaJS]: https://mochajs.org/
+[ChaiJS]: https://www.chaijs.com/
+[husky]: https://typicode.github.io/husky/
+[VSCode dev containers]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers