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 :).

In reply to Re(3) The next step by cjf
in thread the next step by emilford

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