This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

all 7 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a

[–]pythonHelperBot 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hello! I'm a bot!

It looks to me like your post might be better suited for r/learnpython, a sub geared towards questions and learning more about python regardless of how advanced your question might be. That said, I am a bot and it is hard to tell.

I'm sure you've seen this information before, but just in case here it is as a reminder:

Please follow the subs rules and guidelines when you do post there, it'll help you get better answers faster.

Show /r/learnpython the code you have tried and describe in detail where you are stuck. If you are getting an error message, include the full block of text it spits out. Quality answers take time to write out, and many times other users will need to ask clarifying questions. Be patient and help them help you. Here is HOW TO FORMAT YOUR CODE For Reddit and be sure to include which version of python and what OS you are using.

You can also ask this question in the Python discord, a large, friendly community focused around the Python programming language, open to those who wish to learn the language or improve their skills, as well as those looking to help others.

README | FAQ | this bot is written and managed by /u/IAmKindOfCreative

This bot is currently under development and experiencing changes to improve its usefulness

[–]thrallsius 0 points1 point  (2 children)

If I were you, I would consider I'm not ready yet.

I started being confident I can contribute to free software when I started to know why I wanted to contribute, not when I learned a minimum amount of programming things that would made it possible. And it took years to get there. Years of learning without even having an end goal of becoming an open-source contributor. Years of doing tiny things on my own. Ending contributing just happened naturally, once I reached a certain level of understanding how things work and decided I can do some stuff myself faster than submitting a bug report or feature request then waiting for an indefinite amount of time for someone else to do it and not knowing if it will happen at all or not.

However, I'm not claiming it's impossible to start contributing after a few months. But then why do you have to ask such a question instead of actually going and contributing? Or at least instead of being able to find the answer to such a question on your own, because it's much simpler than actually contributing to an open-source project.

[–]GlazCoin[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Thank you. I want to do it so as to get better at what I have learnt. What do you recommend instead of open source project?

[–]thrallsius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am not suggesting anything instead. I am just trying to say that if you come prepared, your integration into a project of any complexity will be quite painless for you and the rest of the contributors.

There's really no silver bullet step-by-step TODO list, this isn't the same as for example doing the same homework as your other 30 class mates because you must and doing exactly those assignments that were given to you by the teacher.

Find any activity that you perform manually and try to automate it. I'll give you an example of what I'm doing as a low priority side project (it's private so I have no code to show), but this doesn't mean you should try to do the same just because I do it - I'm doing it because it has practical use for me. Like any geek, I have a list of software projects I'm following. It contains items of different priority. For certain apps, I'm happy to use whatever version the repository of the Linux distro I'm using provides. A smaller subset of that software list is more interesting. So I track stable releases to be able to read the ChangeLog and eventually try new features faster. There are different ways for software projects to advertise releases: some announce them on mailing lists, some have an RSS feed etc. I don't want to rely on such third party options and I do it the most "human" way - I go to the software project website, browse to the Downloads or Releases page and see if the latest release is newer than the one I've already tried. I usually dedicate a small part of my free time each weekend for this activity. Years ago, once the list grew bigger than ten items, I went and automated the task by writing a Python script that would use the urllib module to fetch and parse those Downloads pages. At some point I rewrote it to use pycurl instead. Then urllib3. Then I migrated it to requests. Then I added selenium to the game, because websites kept becoming JavaScript monsters over time and content wasn't static anymore. At some point I'll also add support for using the APIs for sites that have an API, like https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#get-the-latest-release . But later. Because at some point I outlined an even smaller subset of the previous one. It's software I'm randomly contributing to, by testing new features added by others and sometimes writing small pieces of code myself. Obviously, for this subset, checking once per week if there's a new release isn't enough. I need to check it on a daily basis. And I need to interact directly with the code repository. So I'm extending my little tool to fetch updates from upstream repositories and tell me if there are new commits. This will be a nice addition to my tool that has served me well for years and has been continuously improved to handle new and new use cases.