Helping an OS project

BrummieJim · l33t Joined: 22 Jul 2005 Posts: 683

Hi,
I'm a self-taught C++ programmer and want to find a project, mainly to understand how real-world applications are built and maybe then help with the project. Something simple but with a GUI would be brilliant? Does anyone have any ideas along those lines?

Thanks!

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 3:16 pm Post subject:

BrummieJim,

The first thing to do is to find a project you are interested in, you don't get paid for OSS, unless you are very lucky, so it needs to be fun.

Gentoo runs the Sunrise project to make it easier for contributions from non developers to get accepted, drop into #gentoo-sunrise on irc.freenode.org. There is also bugday on the first Saturday of every month ... Thats January 5th this month. Join #gentoo-bugs
Then there is Gentoos Help Wanted page.
Lastly, you can dip into bugzilla, fix bugs and post patches.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

BrummieJim · l33t Joined: 22 Jul 2005 Posts: 683

I'm not really sure you understand, I just want a simple C++ project that I could help with. It has to be C++ as that's what I want real world experience of, so a lot of the gentoo stuff isn't relevant, I just asked here as people are nice and helpful. I wasn't even vaguely expecting to get paid, just wanted to get to grips with some simple but useful code, and if there's anything I can contribute then I'll do that, but I kind of doubt it'll be that valuable.

tcunha · Retired Dev Joined: 02 Apr 2007 Posts: 128

Rad · Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 8:08 pm Post subject:

If you're new and in for the learning, I'd say do NOT develop for a project that has particularly few or many developers.

In a large team coding mistakes tend to be more of a nuisance, and in a small team you may be significantly distracting individuals, if you happen to have questions. Of course, every project is different.

Also, for me personally, the frameworks used also matter - Boost & QT and co. are what I like, but others do not like the "bloat".

Last but not least, there's few projects where you can even tell whether they're "simple" or "difficult". Just grab an improvement / bug fixing task in a project you'd like to contribute to for starters, discuss it a bit with the other developers, and then hack away! What's most important is that it's something you want to see done, whether or not it suits your skills is only something that you'll figure out by coding.