After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon’s that people mentioned Lemmy doesn’t yet have. Not only i didn’t find it, i also saw that there’s about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it’s maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it’d grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don’t have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected. I’m a sysadmin, haven’t coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven’t ever touched Rust, so can’t help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy. The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that’s PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.
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I’m a professional dev who’s been doing Rust for a few years, and I just looked into their repo for the core project this morning. They’ve tagged some issues as being good for newcomers, which is helpful. I already reviewed someone’s code there to try to help.
I intend to try to pick off some issues. I like to write code, and I’d like to see this project improve.
I am a Software Engineer by trade, and I’m right now trying to learn and contribute to their code base but unfortunately, it takes a lot of time to get used to someone else’s code. Hopefully, contributions will pick up once we’ve all had some time to look at it.
Maybe this is a good excuse for me to (apologies) shake off the Rust and contribute some. I’ve only contributed once or twice to a FOSS project, though, so I’ll need to read up a little on best practices and etiquette.
Don’t shake it off! They need all the Iron Oxide they can get, from what I’m hearing.
How is PHP doing these days? It used to be hugely popular, but seems to have fallen into disregard in a lot of circles. I wonder if PHP being seen as a “easier” language than rust will attract more kbin developers?
Almost everything is easier than rust, except stuff like Elixir or Assembly and stuff…
But rust is just better than the others. Golang is also decent, it’s fast (half the speed of rust is still very fast) and much easier to learn.
I wouldn’t say rust is harder, just different. There aren’t really many languages that are safe in the way rust is safe… Ive done a bunch of intermediate rust tutorials and i actually got the hang of it pretty quickly
But on the other hand, Rust is a highly desirably language whereas PHP has a historically bad rap. I don’t think devs necessarily want easiest. They want whatever is most enjoyable to use. Tooling support also matters. Stuff like static typing, for example, makes unfamiliar code way easier to understand. I’ve contributed to a lot of unfamiliar servers and I’ve noticed that ones in languages like Go are a lot easier because the static typing means it’s easier to read the code. In particular, I found servers written in Python hard to work with, and it’s not for lack of experience with the language (I’ve been using Python for longer than Go).
How easy it is to run the code also matters. Has anyone tried that with Lemmy? I was gonna run a dev kbin instance to try and make some changes, but the amount of work it seemed to require just to run the server was more than I wanted to do at the time (I really just want as close as possible to a single command way to run the server locally to test my changes so I can verify they work). Ease of contributing is very important for me to actually bother to contribute.
I wish so badly I could code, I spent 8 years trying to understand it and get into the industry, but it never quite clicked in my brain. Soooo I do IT infrastructure. I wish so badly to contribute code
May I ask you more about your experience attempting to learn? I don’t know if it’s because I can program but eight years seems a long time. In return, I’d be happy to offer you a few pieces for advice that could help?
That’s so kind of you!
I started by aiming for front-end web dev. I learned HTML & CSS (I know, we’re not PROGRAMMING yet). At the time, that’s all I was hearing it’d take to get into the role. Then it was “you should probably know some Javascript,” and I wasn’t ready for how big of a jump that was. By the time I started understanding it, it became “learn jQuery,” which I learned and used for a couple of small websites, then came the libraries…
“AngularJS is the future” well now I need to learn Git, compiling, CMD…
ReactJS starts becoming a thing and I say “seriously? I’ve learned enough of these things, quit moving the goalpost, React isn’t going to stick around”
Yeah…it definitely stuck around…but as an Open Source nerd, I got super excited by VueJS and started learning that. No jobs in that apparently, aaaand I no longer want to do web dev, especially since I never reached the point of enjoying coding, it was always a means to an end.
So there were two major issues for me: \- I never focused on one language enough to truly LEARN to code, it was a constant sense of “I’m not keeping up”. I may be able to write the syntax, I might know the basics about functions, vars, and looping, but never really got using it in a super practical sense other than to try a couple of personal challenging projects that my ADHD arse couldn’t ever stick with. \
- Me and coding speak and think very differently. Stick with me here, I know, it’s a language, but the way something should be written and formatted are different from how I think it should be, and this is a very hard one to explain to folks. The best example I can give is that I might say like (and this is a poor example because remember, I don’t code and I’m not doing any active coding projects) \
var person = { userInput } var num; function findNumberOfLetters (person) { num = length(person); } function response(person, num) { findNumberOfLetters(person); console.log("Hello " + person + "! Did you know that your name has " + num + " letters in it? Numbers are rad!"); }
I’m sure I did things wrong, but again, this is just for the sake of example. So, I write something like this thinking that it’s nicely structured and easy to read, and inevitably won’t work. I pass this to a friend, and the answer seems to always be a less structured, more nested code. So for this example, something like \
(function response(userInput) { console.log("Hello " + userInput + "! Did you know that your name has " + length(userInput) + " letters in it? Numbers are rad!"); })
Obviously their answer is shorter and this isn’t exactly a complicated program, but for some reason, making the thing that provides a response to the user to do any of the logic feels wrong and messy to me. It’s a really hard thing to explain, I hope this makes some amount of sense, but I just process things very differently than code does, and it just ends up really incompatible. I’ll beat my head for weeks over-complicating something because I want it to “be clean” only for someone I know to come up with something that actually works within seconds.
This isn’t to compare my skills against them, it’s to say that I’m thinking about it wrong, I’m organizing it wrong.
That said, knowing how code functions has helped me to know enough to be dangerous and apply it in other ways, such as building Azure Logic Apps to manage ticket intake, or building alert monitoring. So it’s come in very handy in its own way, I just don’t have to competency to actually make any contributions to Open Source projects, especially since I don’t write in two of the coolest languages that I wish I could learn: Python and Rust.
No pity party here, I love what I do and I don’t intend to change careers to coding, but I do end up feeling helpless in the face of instances like this where I wish so badly to contribute to a project that I care so strongly about and want to see thrive. I know there’s other ways to contribute, such as providing graphics, UI, documentation, financial, hosting, etc. but coding always seems to be the most in need to keep up with demand, and with more and more projects coming out all the time, the more programmers are in need to see them through.
