[Tutor] Working collaboratively

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 09:34:18PM +0100, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> On 19/10/2015 20:53, Alex Kleider wrote:

> >Are there any "starter level" PyPi projects the maintainer of which
> >might consider a novice collaborator?  I would have assumed that
> >such an animal doesn't exist.
> >
> >I do appreciate the advice.

> How about https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/core-mentorship ?

While core-mentorship is open to all, it is intended "for developers 
interested in contributing to core Python development", which means that 
the intent is to teach *experienced* programmers how to deal with the 
specific indiosyncracies of the CPython code base and development 
process. It's also quite low volume.

Have a read of:

https://docs.python.org/devguide/

particularly the FAQs and see if it looks like something you can handle.

I emphasis that you don't need core-mentorship in order to provide 
patches for issues on the Python bug tracker. You could dip your toe in 
the water by finding some easy issues and submitting patches, even just 
doc patches:

http://bugs.python.org

Personally, what worked for me (although at the cost of many, many 
hours over the years!) was reading and discussing other people's code, 
here and on comp.lang.python (also available via email, 
python-list at python.org), reading the standard library code to see how it 
works, and especially reading the recipes in the Python Cookbook 
(O'Reilly Books) and ActiveState:

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/python/

although sometimes the quality is a bit mixed. Even the top-rated 
recipes are not immune to this:

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/python/top/

(although generally anything by Raymond Hettinger is almost guaranteed 
to be amazing). For example, I just came across a top-rated recipe for 
dependency injection which doesn't actually implement dependency 
injection. (That's a good trick, since dependency injection is 
*trivially* easy in Python.)



-- 
Steve