

How to get better at joining a software project? - afarrell

what things can I read or habits can I adopt that will make me better at joining projects and getting to where I can usefully contribute? I found I was never really able to do this at the computer club at uni and have found it really hard to do at work unless I already knew the framework. Is there any practice that will lead me to be more effective at learning a new framework+toolchain+codebase? Any questions I can ask myself or approaches I can take that will enable me to take less than two months to start being useful to an open-source project?
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siscia
You mention that you need to know the framework in order to be able to
contribute...

Maybe you just need to get better at understand code you have never seen
before.

If it is the case you should try to read more code, understand what it does
and why it does it in that specific way.

Since read code for the sake of read code is boring, write code is way more
fun, you need a reason.

Right now I am working to a little side project where I am trying to build a
community of open source developer and companies so that companies will be
able to hire via open source : [http://siscia.github.io/open-
hire/](http://siscia.github.io/open-hire/)

In order to build the community of developers I am trying to write high level
documentation for popular open source project, more than documentation is a
code walk through, explain what is going on and why.

Today it was my first day, but I really learned a TON from a well written
python project and I barely scratched the surface.

I would suggest you to do the same, pick any open source project and write
high level documentation for such project.

What project to choose is up to you, ideally you should know the language, or
at least understand the syntax.

A cool one to do could be, liquid template.

You can find other nice (IMHO) open source project here:
[https://github.com/siscia/open-hire/blob/gh-
pages/_data/lang...](https://github.com/siscia/open-hire/blob/gh-
pages/_data/languanges.yml)

Also, if you are proud of the documentation you wrote I would be extremely
happy to publish your work :)

(Feel free to write me, my email is all over the linked page ;) )

