Open Source Projects Aren’t Magic
Editor’s Note: We believe that open source softwares and communities are a crucial part of software development. As a longtime Groovy community member and manager of the Groovy Community slack, Jenn Strater has intimate knowledge of the open source process; in this piece from 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know she shares her experience in why open source projects aren’t magic and understanding how they work can make them — and your ability to use them — even better. We’d love to know your thoughts on this piece.
One of my biggest pet peeves is hearing people say that X technology, language, build tool, etc., works by magic. If that project is open source, then what I hear is “I’m too lazy to look up how it works,” and I’m reminded of Clarke’s Third Law that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”1
In the days of the modern web, it is easier than ever before to look up the reference guides and source code and find out how that technology works. Many open source projects like the Apache Groovy programming language, for example, have a website (in this case, groovy-lang.org) that lists where you can find the documentation, reference guides, bug tracker, and even links to the source code itself.
If you’re looking for help getting started, guides and tutorials are a great place to begin. If you are more of a visual or hands-on learner, many online learning platforms offer introductory courses for learning new languages through labs, exercises, and group work. Sometimes these are even freely available so that the technologies will be more widely known.
After learning the basic syntax and data structures and starting to use them in your own projects, you’ll likely start encountering unexpected behaviors or even bugs. No matter which ecosystem you choose, this will happen at some point. It’s just a part of the world we live in. You should first look for an issue tracker like Jira or GitHub issues to see if others are having the same problem. If so, there may be workarounds, a fix in a newer version, or a timeline for when this issue will be fixed.
It may take a little work to find out where your technology’s community collaborates. Sometimes it is in chat rooms, forums, or mailing lists. Projects in the Apache foundation, in particular, tend to use Apache infrastructure rather than commercial products. Finding this place is the best way to move from “magic” to clarity.
Even after you master a particular technology, learning is a continuous process and you’ll need to keep doing it. New releases may add new features or change behaviors in ways you will need to understand. Join the mailing list or attend conferences with the open source committers to learn what you need for upgrading your projects. If you are already a subject matter expert, this is a great way you can also contribute to uncovering the “magic” for everyone else.
Lastly, if you find something is unclear or missing, many projects are happy to accept contributions, especially to documentation. The project leads are often people with regular day jobs and other priorities, so they may not respond right away, but this is the best way to help everyone succeed and to uncover the “magic” for the next generation of users.
1 Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. (London: Pan Books, 1973). Now, yes, there is a formal definition in computer science that refers to hiding the implementation details through abstraction, but most people misuse the term “magic” to describe any technology that they find difficult to understand.
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Jenn Strater is a longtime Groovy community member and manager of the Groovy Community slack. She has contributed to various open source projects including CodeNarc, Gradle, Groovy, and Spring REST Docs. As a conference speaker, Jenn has presented at events such as Devoxx Belgium, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, SpringOne Platform, and the O’Reilly Velocity Conference. In 2013, she founded the organization GR8Ladies (now GR8DI) through which she mentors students and junior developers. She is a graduate of Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, and was a Fulbright grant recipient in 2016–2017. She currently resides in the Twin Cities.
