Intermediate Ruby: When someone says "make open source contributions", like... how do you do that?
intermediate_ruby: working on editing first oss video!
Hi there!
Have you heard that you're supposed to make open-source contributions, to become a better software developer?
I've heard this. I've still really never made a good open source contribution. I've got a few years of experience under my belt, so I thought that if I find it daunting, there's got to be at least a few other people out there who find it daunting as well.
I've had a project in mind for a few weeks, to try to do something about this. I few weeks ago, I tweeted this:
any Ruby devs interested in paid OSS work, recording their screen/verbalizing their thought process?
I'll process that recording, end-goal being "a resource for early-career developers more quickly become mid-career developers"
$100, hopefully will < 2 hrs of your time.
Enter Matt Swanson!
He reached out, and we decided to pair on this issue on the Jekyll project:
slugify replaces Tamil vowel marks with hyphen (github.com/jekyll)
We set up a time to chat, and in two hours got this PR containing a fix up and submitted:
Switch slugify regex to support more Unicode character groups
I recorded the whole session and am editing it down into bite-sized chunks, out of which I can extract lessons and concepts that will help early-career software developers level up their skills.
The first chunk I'm working on will be a short (5 min) video about how Matt found this issue to work on, and why he found this issue and not any of the other 83 open issues on the Jekyll repository.
I'll let you know when the first chunk is ready to go!
In the mean time, I have a question for you:
What sort of things have you done to become a better software developer?
Have these things felt effective?
Why do you think that is?
- Josh