• 3 Posts
  • 54 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Looking back on my career, submitting your first merge/pull request can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks (we’re talking about 8+ hour work days). And that’s at companies that have an onboarding process and coworkers you can ask for help and explanations about the code base, architecture etc.

    Getting into someone else’s code (this may include your past self) is almost never easy and often feels convoluted, because it’s very difficult to see the context that existed at the time when the code was written. And by context I mean everything that influenced the decision to write lines the way they were written, including undocumented discussions, necessary but non-obvious workarounds, understanding of the problem and solution space by the dev, general state of mind of the person writing the code and more.

    Don’t beat yourself up because you couldn’t contribute in just a few hours.

    I would first reach out to the devs on IRC/Discord/Matrix and express interest to contribute and see how they react. You don’t know if they would even accept your PR, so I wouldn’t do too much work upfront.

    Then, when they are open to work with you, find out if they are willing to help you ease into the code. What files should you study to implement the changes that you’ve discussed earlier, any considerations that are not obvious, is there legacy code that you shouldn’t touch etc.

    It’s important to keep in mind that (collaborative) software development is more than just being able to write code. And a lot of the surrounding work is not very glamorous or fun.

    I hope that helps and wish you good luck! 🤞







  • I’m sorry to hear that you’re having a hard time getting the software running. I understand that this can be very frustrating.

    As others have said, making yourself the owner of everything can cause numerous issues in the long run and there’s a reason why most distributions DON’T make you root.

    Why are you using Linux in the first place? I think sonarr and jackett both run on Windows as well.

    Don’t let the frustration get the best of you. If you really want to run those tools yourself, then dive into it (and all the technical issues that are part of it), but if you only want to have access to the functionality, you might want to look into a service that takes care of all the technical burden.

    Good luck