Repost from forum:
I recently had a long discussion with a group of developers some who were trained more formally in school programs and some who just joined the open source world out of pure curiosity and persistence. I wonder what karl’s background is? Anyway I thought this would be an interesting topic for discussion, for example:
- How many of you attended school for computer science or programming/ How many self taught?
- What’s your preferred way of learning?
In my opinion the Crypto Space (Bitcoin etc, see documentary at YouTube) seems to have a bottleneck at the entry point, as there are very few programs or courses available due to the constantly shifting focus and rapid growth of the industry. People are uncertain where to get started or how to get involved with these new projects.
- Do you see this a good thing or bad thing for mass adoption?
- Is the exclusivity of crypto keeping people from getting involved?
xet7:
When I studied my BBA, including computer and programming related, I was doing diploma work with my schoolfriend. There was a some device without manual, so my schoolfriend tried every possible way of configuring device, did get it working, and documented how to get it working.
When I was working at some company as Cloud Architect, and was moving servers from private datacenter to AWS, there was not much info how to get all that working, so we learned as we did go, wrote scripts, made autoscaling work, etc, and after getting that working started optimizing. I don’t work there anymore, but they did expand to other countries, visit those countries to help get started, do AWS and other cloud trainings, and lead the market in Nordic countries.
When I started at Open Source with TSC platform game https://secretchronicles.org , I did translate game and website to Finnish, did server admin stuff, just as a hobby, and learned a lot how Open Source works.
When I translated https://wekan.github.io Kanban software to Finnish, for 2 months there were no merging of pull requests by author of Wekan (was tired from trying to do rewrite), so community got worried. Someone suggested doing a fork, so we did it with name Wefork, and I volunteered as new maintainer of “Wefork”, started merging pull requests etc. Later we did get contact to original author of Wekan, and I merged Wefork back to Wekan. I added much more documentation to wiki, merged more pull requests, fixed bugs, coded features, etc. After one year as a hobby, someone asked to add bounties, and to add Commercial Support, that I now provide. So now I have customers all over the world for Wekan work. I could get more money if I was at some full time work, but now as a freelancer working from home or anywhere else, I have more freedom about choosing when I work, when I rest, and what client work I choose to take. So for me personally, I’m now more happy, living my dream.
The point is, if there is no existing training, documentation, code, etc, that is your golden chance. You go first, try how to get it working, fix bugs, make it easy to use, create documentation, ports to multiple platform like Docker / Snap / Sandstorm / VirtualBox / Source etc, create training, and lead the way, and customers come to you.
BTW, I also got question is Wekan less evil.