On 6 April 2010 17:21, Rob Coops <rco...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 5:56 PM, Harry Putnam <rea...@newsguy.com> wrote: >> This doesn't actually have to be a paying job... I'm retired and do >> have an income. But it would need to be a situation where I was >> expected to produce something on a continuing basis. (Of course the >> prospect of pay, somewhere along the line would be a further benefit). >> >> I'm thinking some kind of open source project that could make use of >> someone with only light weight skills starting out. >> >> And when I say light weight... I really mean it. I didn't graduate >> high school, and never went beyond that in formal education. Anything >> to do with programming is strictly self taught and therefore has >> gaping holes in it. >> >> On the other hand, I am capable of writing semi complex programs and >> have written dozens, probably over 100 by now, of scripts for my own >> use. >> >> So, cutting to the chase, where does someone look for that kind of >> opening? >> > I would say have a poke around on Sourceforge (http://www.sourgeforge.com/) > or on Google code (http://code.google.com) and see what you can find there. > There are hundreds of projects out there that require anything from a very > skilled programmer to someone that is able to do basic coding and have some > knowledge of perl. > > The most important thing at least for me is to pick a project that you would > use your self something that really makes you feel like your contributions > are worth while. If you can use it and see the benefit form using it then it > is not unlikely someone else will enjoy your work as well. > I my self have learned PHP in that way, by simply getting my hands dirty and > starting to resolve tickets and feature requests for an open source project. > In the end it even ended up getting me some money when people where asking > me to do custom development for them. And the best thing of all I used most > of the code I wrote my self as well on my own site so most of my > effort benefited not just others but myself as well.
I would add that an important thing to getting involved in an open source project is to communicate with the people who work on it. Find out where they hang out - mailing lists, IRC, forums - and talk to them. Tell them your skill level and ask how you can help (although don't feel you have to accept their answer -- dive into the source and fiddle with whatever takes your fancy). You will need to learn about VCS if you haven't already. The two big ones are git and svn but generally you'll want to learn the one that your chosen project uses. In order to contribute to the project, you need to be working on the latest version so get the code from the VCS repository rather than downloading a tarball or from CPAN. If they have a bug tracker (which they should) have a look through it and try finding out if you can find and fix the bugs. Alternatively, you can start by identifying bugs and filing them in the tracker - this is valuable programming work, even if you're not writing code. It helps if it's a project for a tool which you will use yourself fairly regularly. I am pretty new to open source projects myself, but I've started doing a tiny bit of work on Padre, the Perl IDE. Because I use Padre to write Perl, when I see something that doesn't work, I'm motivated to fix it. Phil -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
