Spyke
lemmy.world

Honestly, not all that great. I mean I love open source, but I was introduced to programming in a rather private and offline realm.

I'm good with procedural backend logic and algorithms, but haven't really gotten in touch with modern libraries or APIs like I want to.

I do try keeping an open mind, but with so many programming languages out there these days, I really don't know where to start or where to focus my mind.

4

I need a portable language which also offers fast access to the raw GPU pixel array memory. But I don't have much use in the standard APIs, my algorithms work differently.

Really hard to explain, but my system is completely nonlinear, so standard APIs just won't work for my purposes.

1

I got a raspberry pi

and my mind exploded once I realized that I could install anything that I wanted or needed for free because of FOSS software

  • one of the reasons why I'm planning to donate to all of the devs whose programs I use once I get a software job
3

I consider cracks for piracy and skyrim mods to be my first sort of taste into what open source can do.

I always found the digital market illogical and dishonest, the commoditization off infinitely copy-able resources sold using the same valuta needed for survival in a world with finite survival resources still feels wrong.

Once I learned that open source is not only free to use but often made with the passion that most for profit work places seem to allergic for i was completely sold (pun intended)

3

I downloaded slackware and copied it onto 30 diskettes to install Linux on my home PC. The 27th disk was faulty, so I returned at 10 in the night to copy it again, because uni would delete the home directories over night.

Tab expansion already worked back then, so I typed tab twice to get all possible commands and read the manpages for all of them.

1

My first real brush was taking part in GSOC, Google Summer of Code, where I got paid to work on an open source project.

Communication with my project mentor was over IRC and I felt this was a fairly large hurdle for me at the time, learning the lingo and the etiquette.

My project at the time went quite poorly. I attribute this failure mostly to myself. I was unable to wake up at the time my mentor wanted to meet and he became frustrated. My work quality was ok, but not the best.

It turned out I had undiagnosed medical issue (DPSD & ADHD); but it's probably a cop out to attribute all of the failure to just that. I got halfway through the thing meaning I got paid still a pretty sizeable sum for the work I did. But it never got commited, so I feel like I cheated slightly. I feel very bad for my mentor who was trying his best, but I was not very good about communicating back then.

Since then, I've attended FOSDEM, contributed small stuff, and even done stuff on some pretty popular projects. But have never been "in" a community like I was then. IRC still scares me. But I do intend to join when I find something I'm really passionate about.

1

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How was your start into the open source community? | Spyke