Intermediate Ruby: Would you be willing to go through a draft blog post and video to help me improve them?
intermediate_ruby: request for volunteers to preview OSS Contribution P1?
Hi there!
It's me, Josh, from https://intermediateruby.com/
I'm getting close to having a project ready to go for you all!
I'm looking for a few volunteers to help me polish a blog post and 14 minute video tutorial. Keep reading for context:
I am always interested in improving my software development skills, and I know one of the most effective ways to do this is to pair with more experienced developers.
It feels even more useful if you your partner get to pair on a real-world problem.
So, I thought that pairing with a senior software developer on fixing a real-world problem would be a great way to improve my own skills, and with some extra work, I could help others derive as much or more learning opportunities from this pairing as I did.
Matt Swanson and I worked through fixing a bug in the Jekyll open-source project.
Afterwards, he tweeted:
"Do open source" is common advice for devs trying to improve. But like...how do you actually do it? Recorded a video w/ @josh_works of us
- Finding an issue
- Setting up codebase
- Fixing a bug
- Submitting a PR
Josh is going to pull out the highlights to share soon!
There is a huge amount of jargon and untaught knowledge that comes up even when navigating the simplest issue we could find. Really eye-opening for me. Here is the PR we submitted: Switch slugify regex to support more Unicode character groups
And a few days later:
This was merged today. Great experience from the Jekyll team/maintainers! Slated for release in v4.1
To quote directly from Cedric Chin's excellent piece Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice
What is Tacit Knowledge? Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone.
I'm close to wrapping up the video edits, annotations, comments. As much as possible, I'm trying to highlight as much of Matt's tacit knowledge as possible, while of course bringing attention the uses of "non-tacit" knowledge as well.
Would you be willing to be an early reader? I'll send you the blog post and first video, and follow up for your feedback, thoughts, and find ways I can make it even better.
Otherwise, you can ignore this email and I'll send you another email soon when this series is ready to go!
-Josh