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?
That’s the point. Don’t contribute to software too difficult to understand.
Or at least start with easier ones.
It seems like you might be describing two different beasts, which could be part of your difficulty:
A codebase that has “dozens and dozens of classes and header files” sounds like a back-end project (written in C or similar), where the end product is an EXE or server app. A codebase where you’d help by updating “placement of a button” is a front-end project (written in HTML or JavaScript), where the output is HTML.
If you’ve cut your teeth contributing to front-end projects, you’ll likely feel more at home contributing to projects where the output is a website. There is a vast difference between working on a project that uses NextJS and contributing to the NextJS engine codebase itself. Finding a project that is using a library you know would be likely much easier to contribute to than contributing to the library itself.
Personally, I would say to pick a specific implementation instance and debug it.
Let me use a button as an example.
If you have a button, say, Subscribe, attach your debugger where execution will go immediately upon click. Follow the path by stepping into (not over) the base implementation(s). Stop along the way if there are any calls that you do not understand what it is doing or why.
I most scenarios, there is common functionality that all objects would need. All buttons need to do x, y, z. All forms need to validate a, b, c, and forms of this specific type also need to validate d.
Usually the tradeoff in complexity upon first learning the code base is offset by the ease of extensibility once you are familiar with it.
I guess it could help to talk to someone familiar with it, maybe they would know the lay of the land. Otherwise it’s a matter of deciphering the architecture of the ancients. Your ability to do that entirely depends on how obscure it all is to you. Many software projects have been born out of the incomprehensibility and unmaintainability of older otherwise-perfectly-functional codebases ☺️
I agree that a lot of free software are old now and big enough to be lost.
Maybe you can find a new and simple project, like https://github.com/lemmygtk/lemoa to improve your skills?
