Contributing to Neon Law Navigator
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Chapter 1
Intro
Chapter 2
Improve the Corpus
Contribute to the product repository
The whole stack is written in Rust in one public monorepo. Anyone can open issues and pull requests. The most useful corpus contributions are specific ones:
- Add a missing legal template. Add a government PDF form. Improve a field map. Add a test that locks a workflow to the law it implements.
View content images locally
The repository deliberately leaves published blog, presentation, and workshop image bytes out of Git. Before running the site locally, hydrate the images referenced by the content tree from the public asset route:
cargo run -p cli -- ops assets fetch-referenced \
--base-url https://www.neonlaw.com/assets
cargo run -p neon
This is a read-only HTTP download and needs neither Google Application Default Credentials nor access to the production
bucket. The bucket stays private: the running application reads only its marketing assets with its own workload identity
and publishes those bytes at /assets/*. Re-run the command when a post gains or changes an image; the files land in
the ignored server/public/img/ tree and are served locally from /public.
Ship through GitOps
Every change travels through a pull request to main. The required checks and resolved review threads protect the
branch; auto-merge lands one squash commit, then the release and deployment flow begins from that reviewed tip.
Work with the store
SurrealDB holds every table. dev up writes its whole connection contract into .devx/env, and nothing defaults: a
process that is not configured fails loudly instead of quietly connecting to the wrong store.
- Connection:
NAVIGATOR_SURREAL_ENDPOINT,_NAMESPACE,_DATABASE. - Schema: one idempotent
DEFINEfile, applied whole on every boot. - Tests: an embedded engine per test — no container, no port, nothing to reclaim.
Add a fillable government PDF
Government forms are one of the best places to contribute because the path is concrete. A form-backed template lives
under templates/forms/..., names the official origin_url, asks its intake questions from the shared question bank in
store/seeds/Question.yaml, and maps answers onto the PDF's AcroForm fields through either a .fields manifest or a
.fields.toml map. The workflow still passes through lawyer_review before the filled packet can be signed or filed.
Chapter 3
Share What You Learn
Tell us what you learned
The most valuable thing you can send is what you learned using it: a template that worked, a checklist item we are missing, a bug, a kaizen improvement — never a client's data, just the craft. Email support@neonlaw.org.
Join a show-and-tell
The Foundation runs public Nebula show-and-tells around the country — come watch a real matter built end to end, ask questions, and meet others doing this work. See the schedule.
Join a presentation
We give talks on how and why we build this. Rust in Peace, our Rust NYC talk, dissects deterministic legal workflows — and every code slide is an exact copy of the shipped repository.
Chapter 4
Put It to Work
Chapter 5
Wrap Up
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