add a contribution file

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+# Guidelines for Contributing
+
+Contributions are welcomed in all forms. These may be bugs, feature requests, documentation, or examples. Please feel free to: 
+
+1. Submit an issue
+1. Open a pull request
+1. Help with outstanding issues and pull requests
+
+## Open an Issue
+
+If you find a bug or have a feature request, please [open an issue](https://github.com/wd60622/conjugate/issues/new) on GitHub.
+
+## Local Development Steps
+
+### Create a forked branch of the repo
+
+Do this once but keep it up to date 
+
+1. [Fork wd60622/conjugate GitHub repo](https://github.com/wd60622/conjugate/fork)
+1. Clone forked repo and set upstream
+
+    ```bash 
+    git clone git@github.com:<your-username>/conjugate.git
+    cd conjugate
+    git remote add upstream git@github.com:wd60622/conjugate.git
+    ```
+
+### Setup Local Development Environment
+
+The project is developed with [Poetry](https://python-poetry.org/).
+
+## Pull Request Checklist
+
+Please check that your pull request meets the following criteria: 
+
+- Unit tests pass
+- pre-commit hooks pass
+- Docstrings and examples render correctly in the documentation
+
+## Documentation
+
+The documentation is built using [MkDocs](https://www.mkdocs.org/) and [mkdocstrings](https://mkdocstrings.github.io/)
+
+The docstrings should be of [Google Style](https://sphinxcontrib-napoleon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/example_google.html)
+
+## Automations
+
+Formatting will be down with [pre-commit](https://pre-commit.com/). 
+
+Tests will run on each pull request
+
+Documentation will be updated with each merge to `main` branch.
+
+Package release to PyPI on every GitHub Release. 
+