Are there people out there that don't understand that software uses readmes and licenses, yet also are able to contribute code? I mean, people can program but not know how to contribute?
There are people who are just learning to code, who got the advice, find a simple open source project and help.
There are people who have only done early stage classes for CS degrees that want to practice in real coding but haven't been exposed to real world development.
There are people who have been coding forever but never paid attention to that stuff because they were always part of a team and didn't worry about it.
One extreme example: we had a person wander into the local hacker space on python user's group night. She had an English degree and had never done anything nearly as technical as coding. She knew that her library science degree would entail some coding and database knowledge and wanted to get up to speed prior to needing it for coursework. She understood the concept of community work and abstract stuff about open source, but not really anything on a practical level. Within the day she was helping one of the member's pet project by copy editing the readme and some of the tech docs. I'm certain she had no idea what a readme was when she got up that morning. (not exactly a code contribution, but definitely a project contribution). Within a couple of months she was able to get her first code submission to a project.
Ignorance and ability are not as correlated as people like to think they are.
Ignorance and ability are not as correlated as people like to think they are.
thank god there are people who understand that. It's amazing to me the number of people who equate the two. Equally ridiculous is the tendency of programmers to spew advice such as "Read the fucking wiki (or documentation)". That really doesnt help newbs who are just barely figuring out the right way to Google things. The thing about being able to find some instructions on how to do X is that it's predicated on actually knowing that instructions are out there somewhere.
Tangential, but I think that one of the greatest gifts of experience and age (not that I'm old, I'm 33 - just not a kid anymore) is a lot of exposure to things I know nothing about. I now know just enough to be able to google lots of different things well, and better, have learned how to discover more things I know nothing about. It's a skill we (humanity) should spend more time developing in youngsters - being a specialist is useful and great, but being a specialist who knows of other specialties is even better, because then it becomes easier to link knowledge sets into awesome solutions.
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Are there people out there that don't understand that software uses readmes and licenses, yet also are able to contribute code? I mean, people can program but not know how to contribute?
I find this hard to imagine.
Yes.
There are people who are just learning to code, who got the advice, find a simple open source project and help.
There are people who have only done early stage classes for CS degrees that want to practice in real coding but haven't been exposed to real world development.
There are people who have been coding forever but never paid attention to that stuff because they were always part of a team and didn't worry about it.
One extreme example: we had a person wander into the local hacker space on python user's group night. She had an English degree and had never done anything nearly as technical as coding. She knew that her library science degree would entail some coding and database knowledge and wanted to get up to speed prior to needing it for coursework. She understood the concept of community work and abstract stuff about open source, but not really anything on a practical level. Within the day she was helping one of the member's pet project by copy editing the readme and some of the tech docs. I'm certain she had no idea what a readme was when she got up that morning. (not exactly a code contribution, but definitely a project contribution). Within a couple of months she was able to get her first code submission to a project.
Ignorance and ability are not as correlated as people like to think they are.
thank god there are people who understand that. It's amazing to me the number of people who equate the two. Equally ridiculous is the tendency of programmers to spew advice such as "Read the fucking wiki (or documentation)". That really doesnt help newbs who are just barely figuring out the right way to Google things. The thing about being able to find some instructions on how to do X is that it's predicated on actually knowing that instructions are out there somewhere.
Tangential, but I think that one of the greatest gifts of experience and age (not that I'm old, I'm 33 - just not a kid anymore) is a lot of exposure to things I know nothing about. I now know just enough to be able to google lots of different things well, and better, have learned how to discover more things I know nothing about. It's a skill we (humanity) should spend more time developing in youngsters - being a specialist is useful and great, but being a specialist who knows of other specialties is even better, because then it becomes easier to link knowledge sets into awesome solutions.