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roystgnr comments on Open thread, 11-17 March 2014 - Less Wrong
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Can you elaborate on this? Where does "the code you've written" come from? Do you produce it in school projects? Or is it from jobs you might take on the side? Are you expected to be passionate enough about programming to have a bunch of code that you wrote for fun and practice lying around? Is it a mix of all three? What should I be doing with my time?
Fun, and practice, and there's always someone on github who could use help with their open source thing.
Source: myself, and everyone else on github who could use help with our open source things. ;-)
Any chance you could point me at one or two?
Background: I enjoy coding, but run into problems with high-level motivation. Point me at something to do, I'll do it (and likely enjoy myself) but when it comes to doing the pointing myself I draw a blank. Most of the code I've written in the last year has come from frustration with inadequate tools at work, which is productive for learning but not for sharing.
I'm currently most proficient with Python, have dabbled in C++, and commit to spending an hour each with the first two open source things anyone points me at. (2x 25 minute pomodoros, this weekend.)
Some of my stuff would be hard to contribute to without a basic background in something like chemical kinetics or partial differential equations, but my main project also kind of has the opposite problem: libMesh has a pretty dated and incomplete unit test suite, and an atrociously dated Debian package, in part because anyone with enough finite elements experience to hear about the project tends to perpetually have more urgent work occupying their time than tedious unit test and dpkg writing.
I'm not sure "want to help me write tedious stuff?" is a good solution to your motivation problem, though. If I was looking for something to jump into for fun, I might try MineTest, a Minecraft clone in C++/Lua which is surprisingly complete but still has a lot of serious limitations. If "most proficient with Python" is the deciding factor, maybe take a look at Matplotlib? A friend of mine is one of the major developers there, and I've been impressed by how fast it tends to supplant gnuplot/matlab/etc as the scriptable-graph-generator of choice for researchers who play with it.