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Volunteer Programming For Dummies?
Tios writes "I've been studying programming languages (C++, Java, C, Visual Basic) on my own with the self-guided, basic textbooks and tutorials, and I'm starting to get tired of working with examples that are not put into real use. I'm motivated to utilize my programming potential, but I've not had any experience programming in a team environment with lead developers, mentors, or collaborators. If finding a programming job isn't an option, I wonder if I could volunteer for programming in an open-source community. If this is a good idea, how do I start? What resources are out there that could get me oriented in volunteering? What kind of basic projects are out there, with a supportive team/mentor for me to develop, practice, learn, and contribute?"
The best practice is just doing it. That's how me and probably many others have learned about programming. In 90's I did have some programming and game developing books, but I pretty much read about those out of curiousity and because they were interesting. Actual programming knowledge comes from making something you like and learning from it. Every time you will learn more and more and it just goes along the way. In my teenage years coding games made the most fun out of it and I always learned more. This was even before Internet started to be so widespread, and only help I had was Delphi's (great!) manual.
Seems you only have experience in programming by examples. There's lots of times you need to be able to solve a specific problem, and programming by examples doesn't teach that really well. You will also be relying on someone's elses views and "best coding practices" thinking, instead of actually developing your own and seeing much further. You need to be comfortable programming and solving problems by yourself if you look to join a team.
I suggest you take some topic that's interesting to you and develop program around it. If you later get a better idea, don't be afraid to move into it. That's what happens to lots of programmers, but when learning it also improves creatly how you look at the problems and you see what you could have done better in your previous projects.
That was my first thought too - he's missing the *middle* step. In between examples and collaborating on a huge multi-programmer project he needs to make something for himself first.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Rentacoder.com. There are a number of requests out there for simple things, requested by people without any money. The strategy seems to be for people new to the site to do a few free or low paying jobs to get their rating up before tackling the high paying jobs, but a lot of these people just need something simple and don't have the time to do it and are (necessarily) understanding of people with little experience.
My wife does odd jobs on there every now and then. Unless you work at it, it's not going to be a good way to make money, but you'll get practical experience (coding experience, if not so much development experience) from it.
Whale
While it might not be exactly what your looking for, I really have to give it up for the mind/life-suck that is MUDding for me, though you could just as easily apply it to the whole gaming universe as a whole, modding, etc.. It's something that brings both fun and function/al learning together, least it did for me.
I think you've identified that as being the key for you.
Do you live near a Junior/Community College? They are often great resources for things like this. The computer club or whatever they call it these days is a great way to meet people you could collaborate with, and most of the professors at most of these schools (in my experience) definitely enjoy being mentors. You'd probably need to enroll in a class to be able to participate, but classes are relatively cheap and they might benefit you anyway.
When I finished college and relocated for a job, but didn't have a family yet, I took classes at my local CC for fun and to meet people, and joined a couple of clubs. This was a great experience for me, and there were several non-traditional (read: older) students who also participated (you might fit into this group). The great thing about the computer club was that other groups would come to us for help... we wrote a lot of programs to help the other clubs (especially the engineering club, since there was so much crossover in membership).
I'd imagine that the computer clubs now participate in open-source projects a lot, but it's been a while since I was involved... but it probably wouldn't hurt for you to start there.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"Volunteer Programming For Dummies"
The headline says it all. You have a marketable skill for which sensible people will pay you MONEY to perform. Giving that skill away for free devalues the skill AND your worth to the market.
To use the car analogy, that is like saying that since you enjoy tinkering and working on your automobiles, and thus posses the skills to do so, you should not work at all on your car or any other unless someone pays you.
What happened to doing things just for the joy of it, or even for bragging rights. Oh yes, and I'm sure being the creator and primary developer on that big open source project that now tons of people are using will not help you in any way in a job interview and / or getting a higher salary (see all of developers who authored / worked on an open source project on their own time, and later was hired and paid well by some company to work on it for your job)
Drop the Visual Basic. Do it now. And never, ever, mention it again.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've been pondering over the same questions for some time, and appart from starting your own project (a good way, but not everybody has the creativity to make a successful new application, many skilled persons are best performers when putting into code someone's else ideas), I would advise you to pick a middle sized project (2 or 3 regular devs), and begin with ancillary tasks.
Many small projects build badly for instance ; so why not clean things up there, providing a good configure script ? Submit this, do the package for your distro, and maintain it. That should give you some familiarity with the code.
Do the code documentation if lacking, or write the user doc. Most projects lack this too. Read each line of the code in the process. At this step, you will certainly become part of the team in some way, and you will have expertise over the code.
Clean bugs. Now, you begin to have a feeling where they might be lurking.
Get involved in the roadmap. Code the new features you feel like you can.
That would be my take on the process
the best course ? find something that interests you, maybe something that you use every day - and find something you don't like about the product, or maybe think of how it could be improved.
it's famously called scratching your own itch.
why is that an effective way ? because you are interested, of course ! you see the results of your work, you use them.
what project to choose ? it's completely up to you. pick one, look at what they have on their web, wiki, join their irc channel, talk with people. see whether you like them - because that is important.
you could look at major projects who have specific sections to help new contributors like http://contributing.openoffice.org/ or http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute, or take a look at the many smaller projects in various categories like personal or system management software, games or... anything.
but really, basic requirements :
1. you are interested;
2. you can work with the people on the project.
everything else will come itself.
also, you are in no way limited to a single project - actually, it is beneficial to participate in multiple projects because you'll get familiar with various organisational, code versioning, documentation and communication practices. contributing a few fixes here and there can be very eye-opening on how these things come together.
good luck :)
Rich
Here's a few tips from my experiences. Try www.projecteuler.net Yes, they're problems with a well defined goal. But it's always up to you how to go about doing them. It's probably one of the best sites to help you develop problem solving skills using programming and forces you to delve into the often vast pool of predefined classes and methods that you will undoubtedly use again in your future if you're a dedicated programmer. I'd also suggest trying to recreate programs you've used before. One of the first things I tried to recreate was minesweeper; a project that vastly improved my recursive function programming, frame organization, and event listening. The point I'm trying to make is, the best way to improve your skills and put the knowledge you already have to good use is to just program. Go out (Well, since we're talking programming, I guess we'll stay in) and just experiment. You don't even need to have a goal in mind. Experiment with the limits of a language. Go see how well arrays handle redefinition. Find instances where you prefer one method over another. Try to improve on your past work and examples that you've been given. Just do it.
"The Y chromosome is genetic. The odds are very good that if you are male then your father was too." -Internet Commenter
Go to sourceforge, find a project that you have an interest in, and send a note to the developer to see if he could use the help.
Be honest about your skill level and intentions...
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
Find a problem you have, and try to solve it by programming. Like make an address book, where you can enter in people's information and search by last name or something. Or make a program that organized your MP3 and finds duplicates. Or make a program that automatically solves Sokudo puzzles. It'll be something with utility you can use and play with, and improve over time as your skills increase. Good Luck!!
Please, please, PLEASE be careful with this. Understand that working with non-profits is a commitment, and that they're going to be 100% reliant on your expertise and documentation. You'll need to be careful to put on your consulting hat as well, ask alot of "Why?" questions. Often times NPOs will tell you what they THINK they need, not what they ACTUALLY need in technology. Be the expert. I work with non-profits as a DB/CRM consultant, and I cannot tell you the number of well-meaning volunteers who have cost non-profits thousands of dollars (not a small sum in the NPO community) in lost time, productivity, and then additional service/IT hours to people like me to fix the mistakes, holes and general sloppiness of applications developed for them in good faith. That "volunteer" project can often turn into a massive money-pit for organizations who cannot afford it. If you do go this route, DOCUMENT EVERYTHING (EVERYTHING), and make sure the org has several copies of your documentation. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't do this, but just understand its not your personal sandbox, these are real people, doing some VERY important and impactful work (most of them at least...) Please don't treat these orgs as second-class citizens or test-beds for your corporate career or cutting-edge untested ideas.
Navigating Sourceforge is a voyage of the damned.
There are only two types of projects here. Those going nowhere, and those already solidly anchored.
Programming has always been about "scratching your own itch", at least that's how I got started in the early 80s when computing classes were introduced at our school in the mid 80s. I wrote a simple basic program on a genie16+ to help us with our maths assignment (some linear algebra stuff) and we both promptly got an "A" for solving the problem in an intelligent manner and not just crunching the numbers, er equations by hand.
I agree that in today's IT world, software is available out there in abundance that probably solves 99% of the problems you might have tackled yourself 20 or even 30 years ago, but there's always something left that may seem interesting. Maybe it's not even outright programming, but "scripting together" some available tools to do a job not previously thought of by the original designers.
The last pet project I worked on was a "remote control" for vdr because I got fed up with vdradmin-am's javascript based remote control that disappeared whenever I had to restart Minefield (so daily as I'm running 3.6a ;-). I needed a stand alone program for that, so I dabbled with Mono and its gui tools a bit, but ultimately ended up with coding something rather ugly in glade / Python.
Of course any python guy worth his salt would ban me into the lower chambers of VB development if they saw the code, but even after 25 years of dealing with computers it's still a bit of a buzz to use your own stuff, something you wrote and that can be adapted quickly to scratch any new itch that might come up.
In closing, you'll find something to work on without ever resorting to sourceforge if you think long and hard enough.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
"If you have to ask, you're no use" What a decidedly non-welcoming attitude. I have the same problem as the OP, and its attitudes like this that really make me resent myself for wanting to learn to program. It's like some super double-secret club where all of the members have some attitude like "Well, it was hard for us, and we had to figure it out on our own (uphill, both ways, in the snow) and so therefor you should have to do the same before we will let you in. Sure, technology is better now, and we could improve the learning structure and lower the barriers to entry, but thats sissy girl talk." New and learning programmers don't want "constant reassurance or hand-holding"... we want mentors who will guide and teach us along the way, without being condescending or flippant. New and learning programmers have ideas and new ways of seeing things that should be equally valued for their potential. You'd think... existing programmers would understand that documentation and training efficacy are vitally important avenues to bring new programmers up to speed. The better you welcome and train new programmers, the better your field becomes. We're not asking for it to be easy.. I have no problem with "earning my place" ... but I completely agree with some other postings here that the field seems either intentionally structured to be difficult to break into... OR so chaotic and unstructured that no one gives a damn to improve those aspects of it.