EDIT: Since posting, I’ve started such a community: https://lemmy.ml/c/learningrustandlemmy, !learningrustandlemmy@lemmy.ml. Please come and join in.
The idea comes from the discussion that occurred over the new lemmy-clone or alternative, SubLinks and how its main feature is that its tech stack is different from lemmy’s which should enable all of the developers who don’t know rust to contribute.
One of the core lemmy devs (dessalines I believe) said responded to these general sentiments by saying something to the effect of rust being a good technical choice and that learning rust in order to contribute would be a good expenditure of time (as tech people need to learn new things all the time anyway).
Soooo … for those interested … how about we all learn together rust through learning about ActivityPub and Lemmy’s codebase and solving problems and making contributions? We could have a community dedicated to asking questions, sharing solutions or ideas and generally discussing all things we’re learning about rust, activitypub, fediverse and lemmy? If an actual community can be built around the desire to learn rust and give back to lemmy with all us newbs working together as much as posslbe … that would have to be a win right?
Even better if those who know more about the topic could use the community as a chance to post or write up what they know for us to learn from. For instance, I’ve glanced at lemmy’s code base (without knowing rust of course) and I feel like it could do with an architecture birds-eye perspective on how the code base works.
Obviously chatting on matrix might be a good place for this, especially as devs and admins are chatting there already … but I feel like the structure of lemmy might be a better place for a sort of reading club.
Any thoughts or takers? I feel like creating the community on lemmy.ml would make sense, maybe having one of the core devs as a mod too?
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So, before I go around posting in other communities (rust, programming and the two fediverse communities come to mind) …
I’ll just tag the current core devs and other contributing devs I’m aware of (@nutomic@lemmy.ml , @dessalines@lemmy.ml , @phiresky@lemmy.world , @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml , @sunaurus@lemm.ee ) … and ask them if they have any thoughts or input on this idea.
As far as its value and meaning for the lemmy project as a whole, I see it as:
- Building a contributor community, especially by leveraging the interest in rust but countering the intimidation by or ignorance of rust
- Which of course feeds back onto lemmy community building too. Creating a sense of shared ownership over one’s social media platform is surely a good thing.
- Providing a more dynamic
CONTRIBUTING.md… by assisting the would-be-contributor’s on ramping by providing a space in which they can search for answers to questions (in addition to dropping into the matrix chat) and have more general technical discussions that out of scope for issue tracker threads. - Also extending what seems to be the core devs’ interest in rust into a rust-learning community with lemmy itself as a practical example.
As I’ve said elsewhere in the thread, I don’t see myself being the sole leader in this at al, as I’m only a learner/newb here on the technical front too, and I think some degree of involvement from anyone with some more experience with either rust or the lemmy code base could go a very long way. Obviously that’s more work for the devs, perhaps more distraction, which I’m rather mindful of. But still, any involvement, any pointers or guidance, and any looping in others who could be helpful or linking to helpful resources for particular purposes … all of that could be invaluable.
Additionally, should a decent community around this form, any direct interaction with the lemmy devs would also be valuable … even if it’s just a general awareness so that any appropriate issues for the community to tackle can be forwarded with some quick guidance.
Anyway … thoughts?!
EDIT:
One clear point relevant to the lemmy.ml admins is whether such a community would be appreciated on the lemmy.ml instance? To me it makes sense given the alignment with the lemmy project, and IIRC, new community creation was turned off on lemmy.ml so this would require your blessings.
I think this is a great idea. I would be happy to help with this by answering questions or other things that need to be done.
Community creation has been enabled for a while on lemmy.ml, so you can just create it yourself.
Thanks and great to hear!
- Building a contributor community, especially by leveraging the interest in rust but countering the intimidation by or ignorance of rust
I would also like to join in! Is there a way to be notified as to when the reading club would start?
Well at the moment I’m just making a suggestion … so who knows what happens. But should something get started, there’ll posts about it around the place and no doubt one in this community … so I’d check in here every so often.
Editing this post would also be something that should be done … so favouriting this post as a reminder might help.
Great to hear about your enthusiasm!
EDIT: and just to clarity, my personal approach on this would be to let the idea breath for a bit and allow others to put their hands to help manage and push it forward, including maybe the core or contributing devs. I personally am not the right person to be a sole leader of such a thing, not at all really, but am happy to contribute to making it a thing, so I’d wait a little bit before pushing really hard on it.
Which isn’t to say that you or someone else shouldn’t push to make things happen … the opposite actually! But yea, me personally, I’ll probably be trying to talk to some others, post the idea elsewhere a bit too, put together a more formal suggestion and see if anyone else is interested in taking on more of a leadership role.
I’m very interested. Participating in active open-source project is very intimidating. Especially when not very strong technically or when suffering of imposter symptom.
I would like to build a place so people feel welcome and at ease to start contributing.
And I would love to be part of a group of people who would start discovering the topic of rust and Lemmy code base at the same time as I do.It may be a good way for me to get into Rust a bit more. And if it could help Lemmy as a whole at the same time, it would be positive for everyone.
So I’m definitely interested in this group.
I think this is a good idea. My main question is: how could this reading club work? With a reading club for a book, you can have participants read a certain number of pages or chapters and discuss those readings regularly over some time frame. There’s a sort of progress from beginning to end that keeps all the participants on the same page (pun unintended). How could that be adapted for reading source code and documentation?
You can start with a bug to be fixed, or a small feature to be implemented. Find out where the relevant code is and understand how it works. Then think about what needs to be changed. You can also look for other ways to improve the code along the way, like writing comments or tests. All of that could be done collaboratively in a thread.
Yea basically what nutomic said … it’s not really a pure “reading club” but a collection of threads/conversations about trying to understand something about lemmy’s code base, rust in general and any issues, bugs, implementations, feature ideas/projects.
A basic “reading club” activity would also be included, which would actually be very valuable … trying to outline and understand the basic structure/architecture of the code base (on which I’m sure any contributors could certainly provide some guidance).
Then there’s also the aim of having people learn rust using lemmy as a practical example as well as the community itself.
