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> You can’t practice it beforehand (no, open source does not give you the same experience). This is ridiculous. Even if you want to ignore the kernel, there ar
by PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> You can’t practice it beforehand (no, open source does not give you the same experience).
This is ridiculous. Even if you want to ignore the kernel, there are plenty of "large established codebases" in the open source world that are at least 20 years old. Firefox, various *office projects, hell, even my own cross-platform DAW Ardour is now 25 years old and is represented by 1.3M lines of code at this point in time.
You absolutely can practice it on open source. What you can't practice dealing with is the corporate BS that will typically surround such codebases. Which is not to say that the large established codebases in the open source world are BS free, but it's different BS.
- francisofascii 2y agoAgreed. If you didn’t work on a codebase of 1000 engineers, how else would you practice.
- sfink 2y agoPersonally, I think that part is just incomplete. I think that there is an attitude that because you have jumped into several older open source projects and successfully made meaningful changes, that you have mastered the art of diving into legacy codebases and can handle anything. Even if those projects were not all that large. People sometimes think that because in theory thousands of people could be looking at the code, that they can treat the code as if it has been vetted over time by thousands of people. But I agree that there are absolutely eligible open source codebases that could be used to practice beforehand. I'd better; I work on Firefox. It is not a small thing to dive into, but people successfully do, and get solid experience from it.