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?
It seems like you might be describing two different beasts, which could be part of your difficulty:
A codebase that has “dozens and dozens of classes and header files” sounds like a back-end project (written in C or similar), where the end product is an EXE or server app. A codebase where you’d help by updating “placement of a button” is a front-end project (written in HTML or JavaScript), where the output is HTML.
If you’ve cut your teeth contributing to front-end projects, you’ll likely feel more at home contributing to projects where the output is a website. There is a vast difference between working on a project that uses NextJS and contributing to the NextJS engine codebase itself. Finding a project that is using a library you know would be likely much easier to contribute to than contributing to the library itself.
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It seems like you might be describing two different beasts, which could be part of your difficulty:
A codebase that has “dozens and dozens of classes and header files” sounds like a back-end project (written in C or similar), where the end product is an EXE or server app. A codebase where you’d help by updating “placement of a button” is a front-end project (written in HTML or JavaScript), where the output is HTML.
If you’ve cut your teeth contributing to front-end projects, you’ll likely feel more at home contributing to projects where the output is a website. There is a vast difference between working on a project that uses NextJS and contributing to the NextJS engine codebase itself. Finding a project that is using a library you know would be likely much easier to contribute to than contributing to the library itself.
It’s a front-end project written in C++; a desktop environment for Unix-like systems.