That would be an excellent idea. But I feel like an even broader community should be created. Like a generic book club, but for code bases! Could even have a small handful of different code bases on the go at a time. I'd love to get to know lemmy's, but also e.g. neovim, or even unciv :)

Maybe one day it could even start tackling Moby Dick!

You know what? I'd be up for it. Sounds like a cool idea and we might be able to contribute as a team where possible.

We should likely have a bi-weekly, monthly, or whatever voice call discussion on the code we've reviewed on mumble (or discord if more convinient)

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'd be interested as well!

I would also like to join in! Is there a way to be notified as to when the reading club would start?

Yes please! I'm kind of a novice at coding and foolishly decided to try doing my own Rust + Activitypub project, so obviously I'm in wayyyy over my head. This would be really really helpful!

Luckily the Rust documentation is very good, but the Activitypub documentation is very bad, and the Activitypub-in-Rust documentation is nearly nonexistent. It must be in the Zeitgeist right now or something, I was literally just wishing that something like what you propose existed.

Honestly the idea sounds fantastic, I'm just not sure I'd pick Lemmy as the codebase to do it with. There are some software projects that are worth some serious study -- Chromium, Wordpress, Linux kernel, git, Redis, Python, lichess. Just because Lemmy is in Rust doesn't automatically mean it's great code.

I'm not saying it's not good code or trying to talk down on the level of accomplishment or anything, just you got a whole symphony of pretty outstanding options to choose from.

That’s a great idea but definitely keep it on Lemmy not matrix. That way it’s easy to come back to and for people to find when googling about the codebase. Also it’s way easier to keep track of questions etc that need answers instead of things getting lost in the chat format of matrix

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.

Sounds interesting. I've been programming in rust for some time now but didn't get to looking at lemmy's codebase yet. This would motivate me to do it.

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.