Re:Ask YC: Getting involved in open source projects
by wheels on Thursday March 06, 2008 @05:45AM
(#130477)
As I said in another recent comment, most OSS coders start off bad; it's being part of the community over time that makes them good. So get a couple sets of asbestos underwear for when the first flames roll in and start small. Find something small that annoys you, fix it, generate a diff (if you don't know how to do this, figure it out, it's easy and will win you a few points right off the bat) and send it to the mailing list. Rinse, wash, repeat, for increasingly large values of "small". :-)
I recently started programming, so that I would actually know what those darn coders were talking about ;-) I find it to be great fun, and want to do more. But I can see that I need to interact with other programmers to pick up ideas, habits, and the best way of doing things. So I also thought of joining an open source project. The problem of course is that i'm a complete noob, and probably won't live up to the high standards. How will that be seen in the community? And what should I do to get going?