After chatting with Noah S on Twitter, I offered to jot up some
thoughts on things that my reduce or eliminate perceived barriers to
entry to work on CouchDB.
Here are a few things that I've been able to think of. In the course
of researching this mail though, I've actually answered many of my own
questions.
"serious business"
A database seems like the kind of project that only extremely talented
people would touch. People depend on the code working. Getting started
would require quite a bit of confidence. Am I good enough?
"Erlang, wtf"
This is a barrier that I've been facing for a while. I'm actually in
the process of learning Erlang, trying to expand my horizons from
Python. Still, a new language makes it harder to have the required
confidence.
"I still don't understand rereduce"
I'm personally not 100% clear on how queries work. This is even after
using the db for a while. I don't want to look like a stupid idiot in
front of great developers. Therefore, there's a high risk of offering
suggestions and getting told to "RTFM"
"Where are the easy bugs?"
[solved]
"wow, big code base"
Is there any documentation on how to project is laid out? Stepping
into a new project is always a little daunting.
"Apache project?"
As someone outside of the ASF, I don't really know what contributing
on an Apache project means.
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