Volunteer Programming For Dummies? 195
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by
Soulskill
from the learning-the-ropes dept.
from the learning-the-ropes dept.
Tios writes "I've been studying programming languages (C++, Java, C, Visual Basic) on my own with the self-guided, basic textbooks and tutorials, and I'm starting to get tired of working with examples that are not put into real use. I'm motivated to utilize my programming potential, but I've not had any experience programming in a team environment with lead developers, mentors, or collaborators. If finding a programming job isn't an option, I wonder if I could volunteer for programming in an open-source community. If this is a good idea, how do I start? What resources are out there that could get me oriented in volunteering? What kind of basic projects are out there, with a supportive team/mentor for me to develop, practice, learn, and contribute?"
make your own stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
The best practice is just doing it. That's how me and probably many others have learned about programming. In 90's I did have some programming and game developing books, but I pretty much read about those out of curiousity and because they were interesting. Actual programming knowledge comes from making something you like and learning from it. Every time you will learn more and more and it just goes along the way. In my teenage years coding games made the most fun out of it and I always learned more. This was even before Internet started to be so widespread, and only help I had was Delphi's (great!) manual.
Seems you only have experience in programming by examples. There's lots of times you need to be able to solve a specific problem, and programming by examples doesn't teach that really well. You will also be relying on someone's elses views and "best coding practices" thinking, instead of actually developing your own and seeing much further. You need to be comfortable programming and solving problems by yourself if you look to join a team.
I suggest you take some topic that's interesting to you and develop program around it. If you later get a better idea, don't be afraid to move into it. That's what happens to lots of programmers, but when learning it also improves creatly how you look at the problems and you see what you could have done better in your previous projects.
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
That was my first thought too - he's missing the *middle* step. In between examples and collaborating on a huge multi-programmer project he needs to make something for himself first.
Re:make your own stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone can sit in a classroom and be taught but a true developer goes out of their way and teaches themselves.
Rent a coder (Score:4, Insightful)
My wife does odd jobs on there every now and then. Unless you work at it, it's not going to be a good way to make money, but you'll get practical experience (coding experience, if not so much development experience) from it.
MUDding Community (Score:2, Insightful)
local community colleges (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you've identified that as being the key for you.
Do you live near a Junior/Community College? They are often great resources for things like this. The computer club or whatever they call it these days is a great way to meet people you could collaborate with, and most of the professors at most of these schools (in my experience) definitely enjoy being mentors. You'd probably need to enroll in a class to be able to participate, but classes are relatively cheap and they might benefit you anyway.
When I finished college and relocated for a job, but didn't have a family yet, I took classes at my local CC for fun and to meet people, and joined a couple of clubs. This was a great experience for me, and there were several non-traditional (read: older) students who also participated (you might fit into this group). The great thing about the computer club was that other groups would come to us for help... we wrote a lot of programs to help the other clubs (especially the engineering club, since there was so much crossover in membership).
I'd imagine that the computer clubs now participate in open-source projects a lot, but it's been a while since I was involved... but it probably wouldn't hurt for you to start there.
Re:make your own stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be a great way to jump right in to team programming experience to learn the skills of those better than yourself and you also learn the patience to work with idiots. In short, that's a great way to learn what kind of coder (team player, leader, lone wolf hacker etc. ) you are.
Re:Volunteer Programming For Dummies ! (Score:1, Insightful)
"Volunteer Programming For Dummies"
The headline says it all. You have a marketable skill for which sensible people will pay you MONEY to perform. Giving that skill away for free devalues the skill AND your worth to the market.
To use the car analogy, that is like saying that since you enjoy tinkering and working on your automobiles, and thus posses the skills to do so, you should not work at all on your car or any other unless someone pays you.
What happened to doing things just for the joy of it, or even for bragging rights. Oh yes, and I'm sure being the creator and primary developer on that big open source project that now tons of people are using will not help you in any way in a job interview and / or getting a higher salary (see all of developers who authored / worked on an open source project on their own time, and later was hired and paid well by some company to work on it for your job)
Drop the Visual Basic. (Score:4, Insightful)
Grind your way... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been pondering over the same questions for some time, and appart from starting your own project (a good way, but not everybody has the creativity to make a successful new application, many skilled persons are best performers when putting into code someone's else ideas), I would advise you to pick a middle sized project (2 or 3 regular devs), and begin with ancillary tasks.
Many small projects build badly for instance ; so why not clean things up there, providing a good configure script ? Submit this, do the package for your distro, and maintain it. That should give you some familiarity with the code.
Do the code documentation if lacking, or write the user doc. Most projects lack this too. Read each line of the code in the process. At this step, you will certainly become part of the team in some way, and you will have expertise over the code.
Clean bugs. Now, you begin to have a feeling where they might be lurking.
Get involved in the roadmap. Code the new features you feel like you can.
That would be my take on the process
scratch an itch (Score:4, Insightful)
the best course ? find something that interests you, maybe something that you use every day - and find something you don't like about the product, or maybe think of how it could be improved.
it's famously called scratching your own itch [catb.org].
why is that an effective way ? because you are interested, of course ! you see the results of your work, you use them.
what project to choose ? it's completely up to you. pick one, look at what they have on their web, wiki, join their irc channel, talk with people. see whether you like them - because that is important.
you could look at major projects who have specific sections to help new contributors like http://contributing.openoffice.org/ [openoffice.org] or http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute [kde.org], or take a look at the many smaller projects in various categories like personal or system management software, games or... anything.
but really, basic requirements :
1. you are interested;
2. you can work with the people on the project.
everything else will come itself.
also, you are in no way limited to a single project - actually, it is beneficial to participate in multiple projects because you'll get familiar with various organisational, code versioning, documentation and communication practices. contributing a few fixes here and there can be very eye-opening on how these things come together.
good luck :)
Just do it (Score:2, Insightful)
Sourceforge (Score:3, Insightful)
Go to sourceforge, find a project that you have an interest in, and send a note to the developer to see if he could use the help.
Be honest about your skill level and intentions...
Re:MUDding Community (Score:2, Insightful)
While it might not be exactly what your looking for, I really have to give it up for the mind/life-suck that is MUDding for me, though you could just as easily apply it to the whole gaming universe as a whole, modding, etc.. It's something that brings both fun and function/al learning together, least it did for me.
If you like games, then this is the BEST advice you can get. Go get modding. I learned loads and loads of stuff while I made all kinds of silly mods for UnrealTournament. 90% of the stuff you produce is not worth releasing, but that doesn't mind. You'll just get the satisfaction of making something yourself. And with a mod you have a whole base to build on.
Just be carefull not to jump into a mod team right away, as they fall fast, and are 99% of the time they aim to high. Just try to make simple things, as they can be great fun. (See CrateDM)
If you are not into games, then there are many other options. If you love websites then go make something with php, just look what you need and build it. Build your own blogging software for all we care, sure there are 100000 php blogging projects out there, but that doesn't learn you anything.
Make your own problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Find a problem you have, and try to solve it by programming. Like make an address book, where you can enter in people's information and search by last name or something. Or make a program that organized your MP3 and finds duplicates. Or make a program that automatically solves Sokudo puzzles. It'll be something with utility you can use and play with, and improve over time as your skills increase. Good Luck!!
Re:Non-Profits (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Drop the Visual Basic. (Score:2, Insightful)
Drop the Visual Basic. Do it now. And never, ever, mention it again.
Why? Sure, no sane programmer would start a new project in VB. But next to other languages it does provide you with a bigger knowledge base. Just don't ever release something new in the wild build on VB. But don't forget, loads of corporate crap has been build on VB, and thus having some VB knowledge doesn't hurt you when trying to find a job.
(I'm an embedded C programmer with VB6 experience)
Re:Start here (Score:5, Insightful)
Navigating Sourceforge is a voyage of the damned.
There are only two types of projects here. Those going nowhere, and those already solidly anchored.
Scratching your own Itch (Score:2, Insightful)
Programming has always been about "scratching your own itch", at least that's how I got started in the early 80s when computing classes were introduced at our school in the mid 80s. I wrote a simple basic program on a genie16+ to help us with our maths assignment (some linear algebra stuff) and we both promptly got an "A" for solving the problem in an intelligent manner and not just crunching the numbers, er equations by hand.
I agree that in today's IT world, software is available out there in abundance that probably solves 99% of the problems you might have tackled yourself 20 or even 30 years ago, but there's always something left that may seem interesting. Maybe it's not even outright programming, but "scripting together" some available tools to do a job not previously thought of by the original designers.
The last pet project I worked on was a "remote control" for vdr because I got fed up with vdradmin-am's javascript based remote control that disappeared whenever I had to restart Minefield (so daily as I'm running 3.6a ;-). I needed a stand alone program for that, so I dabbled with Mono and its gui tools a bit, but ultimately ended up with coding something rather ugly in glade / Python.
Of course any python guy worth his salt would ban me into the lower chambers of VB development if they saw the code, but even after 25 years of dealing with computers it's still a bit of a buzz to use your own stuff, something you wrote and that can be adapted quickly to scratch any new itch that might come up.
In closing, you'll find something to work on without ever resorting to sourceforge if you think long and hard enough.
Re:make your own stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen. Find your personal itch and scratch it. In my case, many moons ago, I had spent all my money on a shiny new Apple //e computer -- but didn't have money for software. I needed to write papers for school (I was a senior in high school at the time), so I wrote an editor in the BASIC that came with the machine. It was a really lame editor, but it got the job done. After that I wrote a database manager, again because I needed one. Then I wrote a clone of the game Lunar Lander [wikipedia.org] just for the hell of it.
Find something you want done, and do it. Don't worry about whether or not anyone else will see it. Like web-comics? Write a screen-scraper that downloads your favorites and mails them to you. Like porn? Ditto. Play paper-and-pencil role-playing games? Write a character generation program, or a combat program. Reinvent the wheel -- write something to unpack zip files, for example. Just write something.
Re:If you have to ask, you're no use (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Exactly (Score:1, Insightful)
There's another middle step he can take if he doesn't have an idea for something that he can build or if he doesn't feel confident in his own skills to take on a project like that.
Documentation.
Find an open source project with crappy documentation and start writing some. There are quite a few that are decent, well-coded projects where the developers haven't had time to tackle the documentation. This will probably mean spending some quality time with the code for the project since the documentation will, by design, be lacking. However reading other people's code will be help him learn, even if that code is crappy and he learns what not to do. Once he's produced a bunch of documentation, contact the project lead and offer it to the project. By that time, he'll no doubt have figured out some area of the code he'd feel comfortable improving. If he's unsure whether the project is interested in the improvement he has in mind, he can bounce the idea off the developers first. When he has questions or gets stuck, the developers will probably be more willing to answer questions and give advice since he's provided them with something of value that's saved them a bunch of work.
Honestly, I'd prefer more people take this approach than the typical start a project and try to make it work. While I understand the sentiment behind those projects (and, indeed, started that way myself), it's still somewhat frustrating to use projects that require me to dig into the source code to figure out how to use them. If more projects had better documentation, I think open source would gain even more credibility than it has now.