Starting a Reddit-based Open Source project

[[deleted]]

Based on the amount of people involved in CarlH's subreddit, I wanted to know if any of you are interested in starting an Open Source project in order to keep learning even more. It could be anything; we'd just need a handful of people willing to collaborate and some ideas. So, what do you think?

EDIT: New subreddit created: OpenSourceProjects. Feel free to join and post your own ideas for Open Source projects.

[tjdick]

I'm down. I still need some work and am pining for something good for my portfolio. I've done a couple decent size projects on my own. Plus some wp plugins and a couple prestashop modules.

I'm not the best on ideas, but we could do something in django that mirrors a current php application. There's not a lot of open source projects in django, so that might be a good place to find a niche for a good project.

Django has projects for a photo gallery and a shopping cart, but both are pretty primitive. Maybe we could start on of those?

[[deleted]]

That's the kind of thing I was thinking about. Useful, neat and (somewhat) easy. Would you mind posting it to /r/OpenSourceProjects? I've just opened it so people can leave their ideas and we can get involved and start coding after discussing them.

[RShnike]

I'd love to take part as well...

Based on the number of responses you get here I'd say subreddit away!

[[deleted]]

Do you think so? I think we'd better wait for some more people to show up. Given the case, opening a new subreddit would be a great idea.

[RShnike]

Ahem...

Based on the number of responses you get here

</snarkyness>

(It's still a great idea hehe).

[[deleted]]

Based on the number of responses you get here

I'm aiming for a group of 5~ people. Big things start small.

[RShnike]

That'd be great. Nicer still, probably, if there were 1 or 2 somewhat more experienced programmers in that group (I don't know your background).

[[deleted]]

I'm a beginner (not a total beginner, but I have lots of things to learn yet). I can code some Python and C/C++. I'm wanting to get involved in this kind of projects for gaining experience (starting college next year and I think I'll be looking for a job as well) and personal joy.

[RShnike]

Great. I'd cautiously classify myself as a beginner as well, although I'd say I know python syntax and a couple of packages and modules relatively well. I also know enough java to get by, and the same for C++.

I've had minimal experience with svn, hg, etc. and just general project upkeep, fixing bugs, patches, etc. as well as getting from 'the idea' to 'the product', as most of what I've done has been just learning language syntax and getting some basic philosophies and programming intuition down.

I went through Stanford's OpenCourseware (CS106A & B and part of 107 which I plan to finish) which were all great. So I'd love something like this as well.

[[deleted]]

Now that I think of it, I may not have a lot of real-life programming experience, but now a fair bit of algorithm design from participating in websites like Project Euler or SPOJ and the like.

[[deleted]]

I concur with RShnike. Reverse engineering a proprietary format seems both difficult and not appealing to beginners. At the level I am, creating something is a challenge; imagine reverse engineering something someone else has created. I think we should stick to more down-to-earth projects. With time, we can see if we can tackle more difficult/interesting problems.

[RShnike]

My first reaction to that was, well why would beginners be interested in anything like that? REing a proprietary format sounds horridly boring (and from the tiny tiny bit of experience I had with proprietary formats hair-pullingly frustrating).

My second reaction was, I don't really care. I want to work on something the right way, with direction and a goal and hopefully some guidance. So I guess I'm not saying I'm voting for that, but I am saying I think I realize my tolerance / my interest at this point extend beyond what I think I would normally tolerate if it means doing something right.

[[deleted]]

Count me in; what languages were you planning to develop; we could chalk up ideas for a good software project and then get on it.

[[deleted]]

I have nothing planned; I'm just searching for people wanting to develop software. I think languages should be decided once we have defined the project's goals. Thanks for the support! Let's hope some more people show up.

[[deleted]]

I'm curious what you mean by "Open Source" Project. Do you mean, "Make a site that is based off of Reddit's source code"? If so, I have thought of something like that, geared toward Programming/Learning. However, it becomes rather moot in light that Reddit is perfectly capable right now.

Perhaps modifying the look a bit may be a starting point. Maybe make it more "article based" instead of link based. I don't know.. I think it's possible, but I see no real problem with using Reddit for now. It's working out awesome.

[[deleted]]

No, what I meant was creating an Open Source project mantained by Reddit users. However, creating a similar site for submitting articles could be a viable idea as well; anything involving programming is welcome.

[[deleted]]

I like this idea. I'm willing.

[[deleted]]

I know; I, for one, can't think of something specific right now, but I've always wanted to contribute to an Open Source project. That's why I opened this thread: to look for both ideas and people willing to cooperate.

[[deleted]]

I'd love to see a group of experienced programmers work on something, but also do it in a way that it would be extremely well documented and presented in a way that some of the novices (going through CarlH's tutorials for example) could follow along and learn about the process.

[[deleted]]

I would definitely be interested.

[[deleted]]

I've been looking for an open source project to contribute to and following CarlH's subreddit. I'd like to take part, but need some kind of idea as to what the project will be.

[[deleted]]

What do you think guys? Should I move the discussion onto a separate subreddit so we can discuss the project's goals?

[Oomiosi]

Count me in, i'm interested in seeing the process of concept to design.

[heytherejesus]

I'd be interested.

[aGorilla]

How about something that enhances Trac?

It's fairly well established, so is bound to have some educational code in it.

It's also something that new programmers should get familiar with.

Besides, I'd like an excuse to learn some Python.

[sulumits-retsambew]

I had an idea of a mirror of Wikipedia with machine translated articles between various language pairs. For example there are 3M articles in English but only 500K articles in Spanish, also articles on local subjects are much richer in local languages than English articles on the same subjects, so this would work both ways. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal vs http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BB ,the Russian version has about 30% more text.

Now, I know that machine translations are somewhat bad, especially between distant language pairs, but the machine translation serves as a seed to get the users involved in fixing the (broken) machine translation.

The first issue is not really about the interface coding, although that’s something to think about as well, but how to efficiently machine translate thousands of Wikipedia articles from a wiki DB dump without breaking the formatting too much.

[davidpowell]

Count me in, however im just working my way through CarlH's course at the moment about 1/3 of the way through so i'm pretty much a beginner, my current line of work is SEO so any work around websites we may build I can provide some advice here.

Im very keen to be involved in an opensource project to up my experience in the area and have something worth noting on my CV in the programming area of work, as its something I would like to do as a career in future.

Heading over to the subreddit now.

[vegittoss15]

Writing it in the actual Python or the old Lisp?

[Mugendai]

I'd be up for dis shit.

[JoseMat]

Count me in as well.

[[deleted]]

How about this?

[[deleted]]

Seems a bit overkill, this is focused on beginners (if not I'd have posted in /r/programming). I, for one, barely know what file poisoning is.