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Lemmy is in serious need of more devs
(beehaw.org)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Programming
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One of the first things I did when I learned about Lemmy and joined an instance is see if I could contribute in some way, shape or form.
But unfortunately it's written in Rust, a language in which I have 0 experience and 0 knowledge. :(
Maybe you know more about web or android development, then you could look into contributing to the lemmy-ui or jerboa.
Yesterday I was annoyed at wide code blocks being wrapped, instead of having a horizontal scrollbar, so I took 20 minutes of googling and hacking around with my minimal css skills and wrote a PR, it's already merged and will probably show up on instances soon.
Very nice!! Congratulations!
Yes that's definitely one the things I am leaning towards. On my main "gripes" with Lemmy right now, is the lack of keyboard shortcuts (think of stuff like, CRTL+enter to send a reply for example). So I wanna see if I can add that in the frontend repository.
Sounds like a cool project!
Make sure to check the issues/PRs, it looks like people already worked on CTRL+Enter.
Oh damn! That's nice! But that means I have to find another thing to do :P
I just though of one, you know how you can insert images with the "upload image" button, drag and drop doesn't seem to be supported yet.
Idk how hard that is to implement cross platform, but many sites support it.
Usually it isn't hard to implement..but that largely depends on the backend.
Might take a crack at this, this weekend.
0 experience and 0 knowledge so far, right? :)
That's the point where you can make more and faster progress than any other!
Hahah.... Shit, now you got me intrigued... xD
If you are familiar with programming in general, you should be able to use those skills in Rust. Also, there is front end developing to do. I haven't looked into what tool kits they use for the front end, but I imagine CSS, HTML, and JavaScript/TypeScript knowledge would be useful.
Yeah, of course you can learn a new language. But it's only moderately helpful for a FOSS project for random people who don't really know the language and really don't know the project to just dip their toes in and commit something.
Often this causes more work that it helps.
I agree with you on driveby PRs don't help much at all. And I'm not going to pretend I'm going to sink the time required to understand how lemmy works and give quality PRs, and I don't expect you to either. I just wanted to say, don't let the language be what stops you.
True that. I just meant, if you are really good in that language, a driveby PR might at least be mildly useful, while if I as a Java dev start messing with a project in a language I don't know, chances are pretty low that I'll be able to produce something worthwhile.
On the frontend, it's primarily React and Bootstrap. I do have some experience with React (with TypeScript), so that's good! And Bootstrap, that has been a few years....
Even as someone with Rust experience, I found the experience of attempting to add a change to be frustrating. Aside from the fact that there's quite a bit of unidiomatic Rust (which I can't be too mad about, but does mean there are a lot of function signatures that just aren't what I'd expect and caused me some pain), the compile times for even small changes are long. After just changing a struct initializer, running
cargo checktook nearly a full minute, due to all the dependencies between the crates.Always a good opportunity to learn something new.
Haha that is true..... 🤔
It's really the best language right now for a lot of things. It's not easy to learn but once you start to get parts of it, it's a great feeling.
It's sadly complicated and that's the only problem with it. If it was less complex it would take over everything because it's just so much better.
Unfortunately the complexity is what makes it so good. I don't know how you could make it simpler but remain just as powerful