Honestly, not all that great. I mean I love open source, but I was introduced to programming in a rather private and offline realm.
I'm good with procedural backend logic and algorithms, but haven't really gotten in touch with modern libraries or APIs like I want to.
I do try keeping an open mind, but with so many programming languages out there these days, I really don't know where to start or where to focus my mind.
What do you want to contribute to? General kinds of things would help. I'm sure the community can help point you to a few projects so you can make a more concerted effort if one catches your fancy.
The best thing about programming is, it's all still programming. Once you get a couple languages down, you can switch it up without nearly as much headache. The API's shouldn't be feared these days, at least the popular ones. They're almost always popular because they're well documented and easy to try often as well.
I need a portable language which also offers fast access to the raw GPU pixel array memory. But I don't have much use in the standard APIs, my algorithms work differently.
Really hard to explain, but my system is completely nonlinear, so standard APIs just won't work for my purposes.
I got a raspberry pi
and my mind exploded once I realized that I could install anything that I wanted or needed for free because of FOSS software
- one of the reasons why I'm planning to donate to all of the devs whose programs I use once I get a software job
I consider cracks for piracy and skyrim mods to be my first sort of taste into what open source can do.
I always found the digital market illogical and dishonest, the commoditization off infinitely copy-able resources sold using the same valuta needed for survival in a world with finite survival resources still feels wrong.
Once I learned that open source is not only free to use but often made with the passion that most for profit work places seem to allergic for i was completely sold (pun intended)
I downloaded slackware and copied it onto 30 diskettes to install Linux on my home PC. The 27th disk was faulty, so I returned at 10 in the night to copy it again, because uni would delete the home directories over night.
Tab expansion already worked back then, so I typed tab twice to get all possible commands and read the manpages for all of them.
It was fine.
My first real brush was taking part in GSOC, Google Summer of Code, where I got paid to work on an open source project.
Communication with my project mentor was over IRC and I felt this was a fairly large hurdle for me at the time, learning the lingo and the etiquette.
My project at the time went quite poorly. I attribute this failure mostly to myself. I was unable to wake up at the time my mentor wanted to meet and he became frustrated. My work quality was ok, but not the best.
It turned out I had undiagnosed medical issue (DPSD & ADHD); but it's probably a cop out to attribute all of the failure to just that. I got halfway through the thing meaning I got paid still a pretty sizeable sum for the work I did. But it never got commited, so I feel like I cheated slightly. I feel very bad for my mentor who was trying his best, but I was not very good about communicating back then.
Since then, I've attended FOSDEM, contributed small stuff, and even done stuff on some pretty popular projects. But have never been "in" a community like I was then. IRC still scares me. But I do intend to join when I find something I'm really passionate about.
