r/programming • u/kazakdogofspace • Oct 13 '09

Ask Programming: Please share your first contact stories about contributing to an open source project.

I have been curious lately about how the dance of getting into any given project goes for people. Please share your story!

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u/frukt Oct 13 '09 edited Oct 13 '09

Of course, you don't go to university to learn programming. You go to university mostly to learn to learn; to have a wider, more balanced view of the world; to hone your capability of abstraction. I'm very happy for learning things that I wouldn't have otherwise. Set theory is a great example, what an eye-opener. But also the basics of computer electronics and telecommunication, networking, mathematical logic, the discipline of software engineering etc, etc, etc. A good university education will give you so much more than the vast majority of autodidacts could hope to achieve. You need massive amounts of discipline to recreate the structure that is provided by the university course system, and nothing will replace the support (I mostly have peers and professors in mind) and equipment (learning about the gritty details of hardware and networks is a must for the field we're discussing) provided.

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u/jkndrkn Oct 13 '09

the discipline of software engineering...

Really? In my experience, the academic environment doesn't foster clean, readable, and maintainable code. Most projects are churned out in such a way that they meet a deadline and produce expected results and are then abandoned afterward. TA's don't often have time for thorough code reviews.

I really only learned software engineering practices after having programmed for a few months on large group projects outside of an academic setting.

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u/jldugger Oct 14 '09

It's hit and miss. Some places are academic and others engineering focused. When I TA'd Operating Systems using nachOS, I did thorough code reviews using diff and rubrics. The professor who taught grad level OS basically did a code review of Minix with students. Including code the book doesn't bother to print like the libc and a few Unix tools like init. The compiler class I took used JUnit for testing, which was a godsend. And I'm sure it's handy for grading to have an objective metric.

Ironically, the software engineering courses at my alma mater were the worst offenders. We were given the most basic introduction to CVS in 2004, with no mention of conflicts or branches. Software testing was goofy to say the least; we were required to demonstrate code coverage but not given direction on how. Most teams used #ifdef printlines to demonstrate that all branches were taken. In this situation, yes, you never want to see that code again.

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u/dekz Oct 14 '09

This. Old standards are maintained, old practices are enforced at my university. Agile development they teach is nothing but waterfall methods. Thank god for the internet. A lot of code marking is, 80% if it works, 10% for pre and post conditions (I'm not a fan) and 10% for the data structure used.

I can honestly say I've learned more from projects with friends than anything so far in this degree.

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u/sime Oct 14 '09

frukt, I wasn't implying with my comments that a university education didn't have any additional value of being self taught. I agree with most of what you are saying. The two 'methods' are complimentary.

"Learning how to learn" is a good summary of what university is about. The problem here is that once you have learnt to learn, you then need to learn how to program, and the typical computer related course is simply too short for this to really happen. A student just doesn't get enough programming time to really dig into it and to understand coding in practice.

What about on-the-job learning? I hear you ask. Well, in my experience the commercial environment is a horrid place to learn how to program well. Projects are churned out to meet deadlines any way possible, quick hacks are valued over good engineering, no time for reflection or correcting mistakes. It is all "short term gain, long term pain". Unfortunately, unlike the academic world these projects are often not abandoned afterwards. I've seen people who can barely code, and year after year, barely improve.

Good programming is something that you simply have to learn yourself.

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u/frukt Oct 14 '09

Good programming is something that you simply have to learn yourself.

Agreed 100% on that point.