in reply to Re: the next step
in thread the next step

Decide upon a product and create your own development project. Look around of what already exists. Decide to do something that noone has done (well) so far. Then start your own development.

I have to disagree.

If there's a project you want to do, and you want to start from scratch -- then by all means, that's your perogotive. But in the case of this poster the goal is to learn more perl, and to become more marketable with perl skills.

There are already lots of perl projects out there that you can contribute to. Working on an existing project can have all of the benefits Biker described (something that intrests you, something you can point at when you sell yourself, something you can be proud of) and it has the added benefits of letting you see other peoples code, and helping you learn how to work colabratively with other people on software (things most people don't learn working on small scripts, which are frequently more marketable then just knowing a lot about perl)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re(3) The next step
by cjf (Parson) on May 09, 2002 at 08:16 UTC

    And I'll disagree with both of you ;-)

    Biker sez:

    Look around of what already exists. Decide to do something that noone has done (well) so far.

    For a first-time project, I wouldn't recommend trying to beat out everyone and design something completely original. You'll waste a lot of your time coming up with the idea, and the point was to learn Perl better, not to sit around trying to figure out a great idea for a project.

    So just pick something you think you can learn from. Who cares if you're reinventing a wheel? You're learning. Yes, there are some things the open source community needs more of (and many it needs less of ;) but those should be reserved for the second project.

    hossman said:

    There are already lots of perl projects out there that you can contribute to. Working on an existing project can have all of the benefits Biker described

    For those who haven't been involved in any open source development before, it would be better to start their own project from scratch. This would allow them to do all the design themselves, which is at least as important as writing the actual code. They won't miss out on colaborative development this way either if their project can attract other developers.

    As for marketability, starting an open source project probably looks better on your resume to most employers than contributing to one. It also helps you develop language-independent design skills, which is a good thing.

    To reduce the number of flames I should note that yes, as a side effect if everyone followed my suggestions the noise/signal ratio of open source projects would increase. It is however usually pretty easy to discern the quality of a project, and when you consider that this means more people are learning through open source development, I don't think it's much of a problem.

    Update: Here's a couple of relevant HOWTO docs you might want to take a look at:

    Best of luck :).

[reply]

In Section Meditations