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?
If the project does not properly document how to get started with contributing either in the readme or the contribute file, either ask if you really want to help out or don’t bother.
If contributions are wanted in larger projects they will have a very thorough documentation on how to setup your development environment.
Always try to get the project running as is before trying to make any changes.
Next up, start small. Like, very small. Many projects have issues that are marked as “good first issue”, they are usually small changes that can be done even by newcomers.
As for syntactic issues, you have 2 options. Either take a closer look at the coding guidelines for the project and the language or use ChatGPT. Just tell it what language/libraries and ask it what the following sample code does. You can ask follow up questions if anything is still unclear.
I use it primarily for C++ and C since I’m really bad at it and some C code look like it summons cthulu.
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If the project does not properly document how to get started with contributing either in the readme or the contribute file, either ask if you really want to help out or don’t bother.
If contributions are wanted in larger projects they will have a very thorough documentation on how to setup your development environment.
Always try to get the project running as is before trying to make any changes.
Next up, start small. Like, very small. Many projects have issues that are marked as “good first issue”, they are usually small changes that can be done even by newcomers.
As for syntactic issues, you have 2 options. Either take a closer look at the coding guidelines for the project and the language or use ChatGPT. Just tell it what language/libraries and ask it what the following sample code does. You can ask follow up questions if anything is still unclear.
I use it primarily for C++ and C since I’m really bad at it and some C code look like it summons cthulu.