Hey there,
I have been a hobbyist programmer for quite some years and have a few smaller projects under my belt: mostly smaller GUI applications that have a few classes at maximum, make use of one or two external libraries and are very thoroughly documented and commented.
Since I love the free software movement and philosophy, I wanted to start contributing to projects I like and help them out.
The thing is, the jump from “hobbyist” to “being able to understand super-efficient compact established repos”… seems to be very hard?
Like, looking into some of these projects, I see dozens upon dozens of classes, header files, with most of them being totally oblique to me. They use syntactic constructs I cannot decipher very well because they have been optimized to irrecognizability, sometimes I cannot even find the starting point of a program properly. The code bases are decades old, use half the obscure compiler and language features, and the maintainers seem to be intimately familiar with everything to the point where I don’t even know what’s what or where to start. My projects were usually like four source files or so, not massive repositories with hundreds of scattered files, external configurations, edge cases, factories of factories, and so on.
If I want to change a simple thing like a placement of a button or - god knows! - introduce a new feature, I would not even remotely know where to start.
Is it just an extreme difficulty spike at this point that I have to trial-and-error through, or am I doing anything wrong?
Is it just an extreme difficulty spike at this point that I have to trial-and-error through, or am I doing anything wrong?
I would say this is the biggest ‘aha’ moment for pretty much any developer - the first time you go from “I built this myself” to “A team built this and has supported it for 10+ years”. Not only can a team of three or four write a lot of code in ten years - they’ll optimize the Hell out of it. It’s ten years worth of edge case bugs, attempts to go faster, new features, etc. And it’s ‘bumpy’ because some of it was done by Dev A in their own style, some of it by Dev B, and so on. So you’ll find the most beautiful implementation for problems that you haven’t even considered before next to “Hello World” level implementation on something else.
The biggest thing you can do to help yourself out is make sure you’re clear on their branching strategy. When you’re the only one working on your code, it’s cool to push to main and occasionally break things and no harm no foul. But for a mature code base, a butterfly flapping its wings on that obscure constructor can have a blast radius of ‘okay, we have to rebase to the last stable commit’. When in doubt, ‘feature/(what you’re working on)’; but there might be more requirements than that, and it’s okay to ask. Some teams have feature requests tracked by number, on a kanban board, some put it in their username, etc.
Get the code pulled down, get it running on your machine (no small task), git checkout -b from wherever you’re pulling a branch off of (hopefully main or master, but again, it’s okay to ask) and then, figure out what the team’s requirements are for PRs. Do they have any testing environments, besides building it locally? Do they use linting or some other process to enforce style on PR reviews?
And then…don’t move a button. (Unless that button actually needs moved!) But try to mimic something that already exists. Create a second button in the new location. Steal from the codebase - implement something small in a way that has been done before. After the new button works - then remove the old button and see what happens.
The longer you deal with a codebase (and the attendant issues and feedback) the more you’ll feel yourself drawn to certain parts of the code that you’re familiar with.
Anyway, hope that advice helps! But most of all, don’t be scared. You will break things unintentionally. Your code will break things. If there’s not a process in place to catch it before it happens, that’s not your fault; that’s the senior dev/owners fault. But do try to limit the damage by using good branching strategies, only PRing after linting/testing, and otherwise following the rules.
