John Udell, in his latest piece at InfoWorld, discusses open source development with Brian Behlendorf and others. This paragraph, a comment by Behlendorf, caught my eye.
"What always frustrated me, in computer science, was how we learned all the low-level things -- which we have libraries for nowadays -- but we didn't learn large-scale integration. What's the skillset to be able to jump into the codebase of something like Mozilla, read the architecture docs, and figure out the makefiles? Computer science classes don't teach you how to dive into foreign codebases."
So, what is the skillset to be able to jump into the codebase of something like Mozilla?
Posted by asa at April 30, 2003 10:59 PMDoes "lots and lots of free time" count as a skill? Because without that, nothing else matters.
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski on May 1, 2003 06:26 AMThe most important skill is an ability to ask questions without hesitation.
Posted by: Boris on May 1, 2003 09:24 AMNow, how about this:
http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/pinkerton/archives/003165.html
Posted by: bird on May 1, 2003 01:27 PMThey should do that in university: hand people random source code with no comments and tell them to write an article and code review explaining what it is, what it does, and how changes they would make.
Posted by: Will on May 2, 2003 01:58 PM