Start your open-source career

#244 – December 31, 2017

this week's favorite

Start your open-source career

his year I gave a talk about how to make open-source projects successful by ensuring everything is in place to attract all kinds of contributions: issues, documentation or code updates. After the talk, the feedback I got was “It’s nice, you showed how to make projects successful, but how do I even startdoing open-source?“. This blog post is an answer to that question; it explains how and where to start contributing to projects and then how to create your own projects.

"A simple makefile" is a unicorn

Whenever there is a discussion online about the tools to build software, there is always That One Person that shows up and claims that all build tools are useless bloated junk and that you should "just write a simple Makefile" because that is lean, efficient, portable and does everything anyone could ever want.

Evil Coding Incantations

What follows is a collection of my favorite surprising, humorous, and yet valid incantations. Generally speaking, taking advantage of these peculiar behaviors is considered evil since your code should be anything but surprising. Thankfully, there are many linters that are primed and ready to make fun of you if you try most of the following tomfoolery. All that being said, knowledge is power, so let’s begin.

Computer latency: 1977-2017

I’ve had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices I’ve run into in the past few months.

Much Assembly Required

An open-source assembly programming multiplayer browser game.

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