Lost in the Source #2

Open what?!

First thing you should know about development is that a lot of things aren’t certain, things change all the time and sometimes unexpectedly. I had my first mentoring session yesterday [life hack: get you a mentor] and it was amazing, it was refreshing, I’m excited about next week. The thing is though, we didn’t do open source, instead we did some coding challenges on codewars.

“But Lola, you said you’d be doing open source, you picked the project and everything! What about the tagline?!”

I hear you ask. The thing about open source is that it’s actually quite difficult to navigate, especially for less seasoned developers. The OS world is large and varied and very easy to get lost in. There are a few sites and services that have lists of OS projects to get involved with but they’re either out of date or are poorly filtered, so finding a suitable project in the language you want to code in with issues/features for your skill set becomes a covert mission that require lots of your hours, and we know how short days are.

“So what did you actually do yesterday?”

Well, CodeWars is a tutorial site but unlike codecademy it’s not very guided and is more community focussed. You can create challenges, help others fix their bugs, etc etc It works on a level (kyu) system with 1 being the hardest. Don’t underestimate the difficulty of this just because it’s an online (and somewhat fun) tutorial, yesterday I was introduced to functional programming and yeah, my brain bent in ways I didn’t know were possible. The difficult thing wasn’t necessarily not understanding what to do, it was translating the English into Ruby (code), which is something I struggle with, and sometimes the journey is really English — Math — Ruby. But understanding is the first hump, once I knew what I wanted to do and kind of figured out how to do it, the rest was just about experimenting with different methods. I’m reluctant to share the actual work I did because, well, I don’t want to give away any of the answers but I am thinking of sharing weekly coding challenges, if that’s something you guys would be interested in, tweet me.

For now, I’ll be working on coding challenges either through codewars or project euler but this is definitely not the end of my OS journey, I have something up my sleeve that I hope to start pretty soon.