Hey there,

I have been a hobbyist programmer for quite some years and have a few smaller projects under my belt: mostly smaller GUI applications that have a few classes at maximum, make use of one or two external libraries and are very thoroughly documented and commented.

Since I love the free software movement and philosophy, I wanted to start contributing to projects I like and help them out.

The thing is, the jump from “hobbyist” to “being able to understand super-efficient compact established repos”… seems to be very hard?

Like, looking into some of these projects, I see dozens upon dozens of classes, header files, with most of them being totally oblique to me. They use syntactic constructs I cannot decipher very well because they have been optimized to irrecognizability, sometimes I cannot even find the starting point of a program properly. The code bases are decades old, use half the obscure compiler and language features, and the maintainers seem to be intimately familiar with everything to the point where I don’t even know what’s what or where to start. My projects were usually like four source files or so, not massive repositories with hundreds of scattered files, external configurations, edge cases, factories of factories, and so on.

If I want to change a simple thing like a placement of a button or - god knows! - introduce a new feature, I would not even remotely know where to start.

Is it just an extreme difficulty spike at this point that I have to trial-and-error through, or am I doing anything wrong?

  • m_randall@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 year ago

    It’s easy! Don’t. It’s not possible to do.

    Focus on one small area instead of the whole project. If there isn’t a “beginner” ticket selection then find one (or give yourself a goal). Figure out where that code is and start playing around with it.

    As you branch out and work on more and more tickets you’ll gain more and more experience. You’ll understand how different blocks and systems interact and gain a better overall understanding of the code base in general but you’ll never be able to keep everything in your head. It’s just not needed.

    And I don’t think it’s been said yet but as a former vi guy a good IDE was a huge boost to productivity. Ease of navigation around the code, intelligent searching, etc really helped out in the exploratory phase.