Aug. 6th, 2009

cesy: "Cesy" - An old-fashioned quill and ink (Default)
[personal profile] cesy
There's been discussion in a couple of places recently about making it easier for people to start out in development when you know pretty much nothing. I think someone is working on an official guide, but I figured I'd put something up here in the meantime, as [personal profile] 7rin was asking.

Firstly, most of our dev-training currently happens on IRC. The wiki page explains how to get on there. However, I know IRC isn't possible for everyone, so I think the plan is for people to be able to ask stuff in this community as well.

The first thing to do is to request a Dreamhack. These are our development boxes, and are the basic tool you'll need to do anything. Note that getting one and not using it doesn't use up any resources, so don't worry if you have to drop out of dev stuff later. Once you've got it, follow the steps in the getting started wiki page on Dreamhacks, though it may not all make sense at this stage.

You've then got two choices of method, depending on how you prefer to learn. Either way, a really important point to bear in mind is that at various points in this process, it will all go horribly wrong. That's normal. There will be something you don't understand, or something breaks, and you have no idea what's going on. That's okay. Post an entry here, or drop a comment to any dev (*) and we'll find someone who can help you fix it. We all have it happen to us on a regular basis. Things Going Wrong is a normal part of programming, not a sign that you've failed. This is important to remember when you've spent three hours banging your head against a brick wall. Anyway.

Method 1
Start having a look at Bugzilla. For Bugzilla, I'd suggest you first set up a new email address, as it gets displayed publicly, set it to forward to your main address, and then sign up on Bugzilla. The most useful search is for the keyword "effort-minor", which should include all the easy bugs. Once you've got a Dreamhack running that you can log into, and you've found a bug you like the look of, I'd suggest asking in IRC or the community to check whether it's harder than it looks or anything like that.

Method 2
Just look at the code on your Dreamhack for something where you know what it does (for example htdocs/userinfo.bml is the profile) and read a Perl book/online guide to figure out what's going on in there, asking in IRC or here when you're stumped. If you've never used a command line before, this wiki page will help.

This: http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/ and http://www.ebb.org/PickingUpPerl/ are the Perl books we recommend.

http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/BML is the Wiki page for BML. But BML is evil.

Other resources
Other resources to look at, if you haven't already, are the wiki and this community. Membership is open and posting is open to all members so you should be able to post in here if you get stuck.

http://www.linux.org/lessons/beginner/toc.html looks like a good Linux introduction and is relevant from lesson 5/6 onwards.

W3Schools have a good basic guide to CSS.

Of course, I've glossed over an awful lot of things, there, so do tell me which bits need more explaining.

(Thanks to [personal profile] yvi for her suggestions and additions.)

(*): This includes me, most of the people commenting in this community, and anyone posting in [site community profile] changelog. Most of us can be contacted by PM, or just leave a comment on any public entry, either here or in our journals.
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise
So, you have the "Welcome to your Dreamhack!" email sitting in front of you ... and absolutely no idea where to start. You've never used any kind of Unix-based operating system before, and the Wiki pages might as well be in Klingon.

Fear not! I've written a command-line tutorial on the Wiki. I've tried to keep it simple but cover everything that might be useful.

(If you're experienced with Unix and want to expand it, please do! Do try to avoid confusing people, though -- we don't need to get into everything.)
yvi: Dreamsheep in Germany's national colors (Dreamsheep - Germany)
[personal profile] yvi
So, [personal profile] afuna is enabling me again.

The idea basically is that it's easier to actually do some bugfixes aster a few days of learning basic Linux commands and some Perl exercises, because the big code can be intimidating. But sending people to read a book is also not very welcoming and also not always relevant to the type of code we are dealing with here.

Besides, doing a tutorial where you learn what $u->{userid} does is hopefully more interesting than doing $foo->{bar} exercises.

So, how about instead we have some Dreamwidth-specific tutorials and exercises?

What I am thinking about is an area on the Wiki with a general introduction to how the code is structured (which we already have, it may just need to be elaborated and tied into this new system) and what the basic Linux commands you may need are (cd, cp, grep, find, diff), and after that a few tutorial problems.

These would need to be:

1) ordered in difficulty level
2) relevant to the kind of problem you are likely to come across in the first bugs (searching for where code is, searching for where functions are defined and what they return, getting the value of a variable,...)
3) interesting
4) deal with the different kinds of code (Perl, BML, CSS, S2)
5) not take too long - an hour max for each one, so that you can hopefully do them in one session
6) with an obvious result; ideally many of the exercises would be based on an existing bugfix

Then for the first examples, I'd like have a detailed walk-through, including how to generate the patch in the end and how you'd upload the patch. Also, the page could link existing walk-throughs, which are also very helpful.

Does this sound like a good idea? Does this sound interesting to the new developers here, would you like to have that? [This would definitely not replace help on IRC or through this community] And for anyone who is new or still remembers being new, what areas would help be needed in?

Would anyone be interested in helping me with that? My strength is definitely not with putting things into understandable words, but I think I can come up with small, interesting challenges, example patches and such things.

And lastly, if you think this is a good idea, throw suggestions at me.

Profile

dw_dev_training: The stylised 'd', with the word 'dev' above, and the word 'training' at the side, representing the dw_dev_training comm. (Default)
Dreamwidth Development Training

September 2022

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
1112131415 1617
18192021222324
252627282930 

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 2nd, 2025 11:35 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios