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

[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!