Some reading material - The Architecture of Open Source Applications: three books (+ bonus book) for your education. Different levels of writing quality since i

Some reading material - The Architecture of Open Source Applications: three books (+ bonus book) for your education. Different levels of writing quality since it's many authors, but lots of useful stuff in there: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html Doesn't include much if any source code, but once you've read the explanation of how something works you can then go read the source. -- My 5-second heuristic for judging open source project quality: check for tests. If there's no tests, I assume it's broken crap and move on. Not always true, but it's a pretty good heuristic. Next, check for different levels of tests (depends on project): unit, end-to-end with running system. Good tests will also have comments/docstrings explaining the goal of the test separately from the code. Good comments/docstrings in the code are also useful signs of quality. I barely know Ruby, but today I submitted a PR to Sinatra. It wasn't that hard to figure out what was going on, because the code was well-commented and easy to follow. I even have some sense of how to do testing because they have a bunch of well-documented tests.