Lesson Zero: Identifying Goals

[misskat]

So, this is lesson zero: figuring out what you want to get out of this experience. I know that for me, personally, I want to be able to hack on DW, And fix bugs that Support encounters. My primary goal is to become familiar enough with Dreamwidth's code base that I can make that happen.

What are your goals for this project? What do you want to accomplish? Will you hack for DW?

How much experience do you have? Are you familiar with other languages, or will the Perl be your first experience? Have you toyed with the command line before? Where is a good baseline for us to start?

Please comment with your responses, and any other relevant information.


( I apologize for any weirdnesses. I am dictating this via my phone. My hands are aliens.)

Comments

[alexseanchai]

I would kind of like to hack for DW. I'm also interested in making a website that does what this does only with less misusing-Google-Docs flavor to it—I hear Ruby might be better for that than Perl, but I'll work it out.

I used to play with Visual Basic. Long time ago. The command line frightens me in Linux, but I've used it—I just need Very Clear Instructions.

[jjhunter]

Yes! I do want to hack for Dreamwidth. :o)

I have an eclectic smattering of coding experience and familiarity with other languages; I'm hoping this will help me consolidate the lot a bit better, and prove a supportive & encouraging environment to practice, practice, practice and contribute.

[liv]

Definitely DW hacking, ultimately. Specifically, I'm just starting to branch out from just style things to bugs that involve more backend, ie programming in Perl as well as S2.

My intermediate goal is to be familiar enough with Perl and programming in general that I can come up with the right search terms to help me fix problems on my own. And if I can't, the right terminology to ask question in IRC that don't take half an hour of debugging my question before people can help me!

Experience: I'm quite good at S2 and reasonably know my way around the styles-related DW codebase. I'm ok with Git and Bash, though still a beginner. I have reasonable HTML and CSS, if I could stand to improve. I don't really have any real programming languages, but I have a reasonable grasp of the general concepts of programming because I used to code quite a lot when I was a kid in the 80s. Things have moved on a lot since then!

[sporky_rat]

I would like to be able to figure out what's going on with some of the things in Support as well as some of the things in making things better for other people. (I used the word 'things' a little too much there.)

I'm decent at HTML and can usually figure out what the hell's going on with CSS and I took a Visual Basic and PASCAL class?

[momijizukamori]

I'm definitely interested in hacking on DW, and in general would like to get better at stepping in and learning an already-there codebase, as well as how to break down a big project into it's necessary components.

I'm familiar with basic data structures and coditionals in Perl and Python - I used to know them in Java and Scheme too but I think I've forgotten most of that. I'm fairly well-versed in S2 (aka perl-lite) and HTML/CSS. I'm also fairly comfortable on the commandline and am getting comfortable with git.

(I also realize I probably skew the stats some here, but I'm more than okay being a helper for earlier stuff)

[azurelunatic]

I would like to hack on, around, in, and beside DW. I'd also like to learn a little more generally applicable programmy stuff, because you never know when it might be useful.

I have had a few classes, and have been marinating in IRC for the better part of the last decade. I have toyed around with some QBASIC, Visual Basic, a sampling of Pascal, and some C++ and SQL for flavor. I have touched the command line carefully, and it did not explode at least once.

[alierak]

I have a lot of experience with a lot of programming languages including Perl, and occasionally contribute small things to DW. Don't mind me. There are big chunks of DW (and probably Perl) that I'm not familiar with from everyday use, so I always feel like I'm reverse engineering everything when I try to help. I'm looking to keep up with DW best practices, what we teach our devs, and be able to contribute more than the occasional tiny patch.

[randomling]

I'm already a DW hacker, but I'd like to gain more confidence in tackling some of the Giant Bugs I want to fix, and more confidence in Perl and programming generally.

I'd also like to feel more confidence with the stepping in and learning an existing codebase, as opposed to building my own stuff from scratch, which is a different kind of challenge (though, I'm not doing enough of that, either).

I'm not super-experienced, but I'd also like to tentatively raise my hand as a potential mentor for Perl beginners. I have some idea what's going on, I'm new enough that I know what it's like to be learning (I still am!), and I like detective work and figuring out What's Going On. :D

[ninetydegrees]

I wanna be able to work on DW bugs I couldn't work on before or needed collaboration with.

I'm well-versed in HTML (although not so much with HTML5) and CSS (2 and 3); I know S2 to some extent which gives me familiarity with some basics (variables, methods, conditionals,...) so that I can read some code and do some small things but sometimes I'm just so out of my depth. I believe I actually went through some chapters of Beginning Perl but I never finished it. Also I'd like it if we could do some practical things related to DW like working on an unresolved bug together because I feel a lot of courses don't really help you do things on your own.

[misskat]

That's part of the plan! The hope is to get every person here to pick one bug out of a list, and then work on it with the class. :)

[ninetydegrees]

Yay! Awesome!