ubermajestix

I'm a "young gun" (26) without a formal degree in CS. I believe the number of graduates in CS dropping isn't affecting finding talented people. The talented people aren't taking CS and are not even graduating or going to college.

I graduated with a degree in mathematical economics from a liberal arts school and took some CS (Java and C++) along the way, but ended up not pursuing a degree because I could tell the technology being taught was outdated and largely irrelevant. I taught myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails mostly through reading books and blogs while trying to solve a problem for a client I was providing desktop support.

A friend's consulting shop recently hired their 20 year old intern b/c he is a great hacker, and he, in turn, dropped out of a CS program largely recognized as "very good" b/c it was he thought they were basically teaching "solved problems."

The point here is that a good hacker comes at any age, and your technical ability and attitude mater regardless.

I love working with the older guys b/c they have failed, a lot, and can steer me in the right direction and offer wisdom whereas I bring enthusiasm and an open mind.

I like the bounty idea and it could be a way to monezite the app if you can get traction. Didn't mean to be harsh in my earlier comments I just hadn't gotten a good idea of what you guys were thinking of providing. Good luck!

I think contributing to open source is more about "fixing a broken window" than a service finding me projects it thinks I should work on or that have lots of broken windows. I have more than enough things that I should work on, and when I contribute to open source its always because the tools available didn't work for me. GitHub makes it pretty easy to find projects you're interested in and pretty easy to start contributing code to those projects, so I guess I don't get it.

Why would I want to contribute to someone's project that I don't even use? What would inspire me to all of the sudden want to hack on git's internals and then not dive into the source? On one hand, yeah, finding some menial bug or documentation fix I can work on to start contributing to a project is great, but at the higher levels just presenting tasks from issue trackers for me to smash, I don't think is a great idea.

Look at the ActiveRecord/AREL rewrite, sure @tenderlove was just squashing bugs in the Lighthouse tracker but only because, as he says, "AT&T Interactive started paying me to work on Rails" (http://engineering.attinteractive.com/2010/10/arel-two-point...) If you don't dive in real deep you can't really make things better and that takes a lot of time. You end up investing a lot in the project and the people around the project. So I don't see where GitHub doesn't support this. How does your product makes any of this any easier/better/more full of awesome?