in reply to Selecting a project for Learning

My top two tips here are:

Slightly aside, as a third option:

I have a young daughter and a full-time job, so I get maybe 15min of serious private "thinking time" per day. This is nowhere near enough for me to make significant progress on my dozens of pet projects. I've often thought about a project model where I blurt out one-page specifications or summaries of what I'd love to see written, and offer a small money or bounty bounty to entice some person such as yourself to write up the initial implementation. A "want ad" for a small learning project. I could write them myself, I want to write them myself, I know exactly what I'd write if I had the time, but I don't have time. I'd rather give someone else the idea (and an incentive), than to let the idea wither away on the vine.

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[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

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Re: Re: Selecting a project for Learning
by Coplan (Pilgrim) on Apr 30, 2003 at 16:31 UTC
    Your third option sounds very interesting. I will say that I'm quite good at teaching myself the solutions to most problems in due time. But as I said, it's always finding something to do to promote my learning process that's the problem. After all, how do you know that space travel is possible if you're not even aware that space exists? Same goes for Perl...how do I know I can do that if I don't even know that "that" is possible with Perl.

    Of course, having such a model would be very interesting. But I will admit it depends on what the goals of each small project might be. I'll be honest, there are things that wouldn't interest me enough to keep me coding. I'm not a programmer by nature. But I'm interested in many things. I might find some of your mini projects very exciting. Others might not peak my interests very much.

    As for improving projects...I'm playing around a bit with a lot of projects right now. Unfortunately, they either have code that's beyond my level (and I can't understand enough to improve upon it), or they aren't well documented. Such is the life of Open Source, eh?

    Thanks for your thoughts.

    --Coplan

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