Admin of https://kglitch.social, an experimental Kbin instance.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • You have it backwards - we don’t find a cool project we want to contribute to and then try to learn the technology needed. Instead, we already know the language/tech/tool from our work or education and then seek cool projects to contribute to that use that language/tech/tool.

    As a beginner you can’t expect to rock up to a github project and be productive or even understand what is going on. Usually open source projects are not extensively documented and no one will have time to show you around. That is no way to learn.

    No one can be productive in more than a handful of languages/tools. Once you have more experience you will become specialised in certain languages and can seek projects that use those languages.

    For now, try to find a situation where there are people around who will invest time in helping you to build your skills. A supportive employer, or tertiary education.













  • I would again. The mistake was continuing with it for too long.

    15 years ago when I got into PHP, Python wasn’t as mature as it is now for web development. There was Django but Ruby on Rails was similar and more popular. At the time, PHP had a vibrant open source community and lots of options. It was the right choice for the moment but things have moved on. PHP got stuck trying to make PHP 6 and spun it’s wheels while Python went from strength to strength.

    The time to bail on PHP was probably around or before 2015. The writing was on the wall by then. But it wasn’t until 2019 that I got into Python.

    These days all my PHP work is maintenance and migration, all new work is Python-based.