Thoughts on projects

What surprised me the most is the size and scope of the projects we’ve looked at so far. Like MuseScore, most of these projects are relatively nieche (bar VSCode or Pandas) yet extremely intricate and complicated. And I’m not even talking about code. There are hundreds of contributors, thousands of open issues, and (in good projects) pull requests are being open and closed like the door of a professor’s office before the final. It’s fascinating how much work goes into maintaining an open source project — coding is just one part of it.

My main question is: How do the project maintainers keep ALL THAT in mind all the time?

And another question: How do I comb through all this supporting documentation and find the exactly right way to contribute?

Expectations

Exciting stuff

Here’s what I am most excited about:

• Making a change. The most exciting, or I should say satistying, part of the process for me is seeing my changes accepted and implemented by the project maintainers. I even felt that when someone from OpenStreetMap looked at my contribution, so I can only imagine how it feels when you build something using code!
• Collaboration and networking. From a lucrative perspective, it’s good to put yourself out there as a programmer — and not just a programmer, but a collaborative one! Coding is hard, but being a good person on the Internet is harder. Connecting (even just for the sake of connecting) with people who share my interests and want contribute to those interests can be, I anticipate, very rewarding.

Anticipated challenges

For me, the main challenge will be to adhere to the formatting and other guidelines of a specific project that I will be contributing to. I am not 100% proficient in Python or JavaScript or any other language that we might have to use, but I can code and sometimes I can code well. It’s just that editing is not really my style, I’m just happy when my program works.