From: Timothy Hunter Date: 2007-01-02T21:16:52+09:00 Subject: Re: where to begin? Oin Maple wrote: > Hello! > > I would like to start working on a real project. Start "seeing some action". > I've been reading through ruby books for half a year now, but i haven't yet > started to make real programs. What I would like to do is help an opensource > project somewhere, but i don't really know how or who would need this help > and what skills would that require. There are a lot of questions. When am I > good enough to enroll in such a project? What do I do? Where do I look? > > I tried searching for a project on rubyforge, but I only found 3 requests for > a ruby developer and they all looked too complicated. I got put off when > seeing so many lines of code. How exactly does a new developer help when > joining a big project that has been going on for a very long time. Should I > even attempt that? > > there are really lots of questions in my mind. I hope someone will point me in > the right direction. > > Thank you! > A lot of open source projects need better documentation. A way to start might be to study a project that interests you and work on their doc. In the process of doing so you'll probably need to write a lot of example programs to learn how the code works. It's quite possible that you'll find bugs for which you could try to write the fix. If you read and write a (human) language other than the one used for the project's current doc, you could offer to translate it.