EDIT: Since posting, I’ve started such a community: https://lemmy.ml/c/learningrustandlemmy, !learningrustandlemmy@lemmy.ml. Please come and join in.
The idea comes from the discussion that occurred over the new lemmy-clone or alternative, SubLinks and how its main feature is that its tech stack is different from lemmy’s which should enable all of the developers who don’t know rust to contribute.
One of the core lemmy devs (dessalines I believe) said responded to these general sentiments by saying something to the effect of rust being a good technical choice and that learning rust in order to contribute would be a good expenditure of time (as tech people need to learn new things all the time anyway).
Soooo … for those interested … how about we all learn together rust through learning about ActivityPub and Lemmy’s codebase and solving problems and making contributions? We could have a community dedicated to asking questions, sharing solutions or ideas and generally discussing all things we’re learning about rust, activitypub, fediverse and lemmy? If an actual community can be built around the desire to learn rust and give back to lemmy with all us newbs working together as much as posslbe … that would have to be a win right?
Even better if those who know more about the topic could use the community as a chance to post or write up what they know for us to learn from. For instance, I’ve glanced at lemmy’s code base (without knowing rust of course) and I feel like it could do with an architecture birds-eye perspective on how the code base works.
Obviously chatting on matrix might be a good place for this, especially as devs and admins are chatting there already … but I feel like the structure of lemmy might be a better place for a sort of reading club.
Any thoughts or takers? I feel like creating the community on lemmy.ml would make sense, maybe having one of the core devs as a mod too?
I think this is a good idea. My main question is: how could this reading club work? With a reading club for a book, you can have participants read a certain number of pages or chapters and discuss those readings regularly over some time frame. There’s a sort of progress from beginning to end that keeps all the participants on the same page (pun unintended). How could that be adapted for reading source code and documentation?
You can start with a bug to be fixed, or a small feature to be implemented. Find out where the relevant code is and understand how it works. Then think about what needs to be changed. You can also look for other ways to improve the code along the way, like writing comments or tests. All of that could be done collaboratively in a thread.
Yea basically what nutomic said … it’s not really a pure “reading club” but a collection of threads/conversations about trying to understand something about lemmy’s code base, rust in general and any issues, bugs, implementations, feature ideas/projects.
A basic “reading club” activity would also be included, which would actually be very valuable … trying to outline and understand the basic structure/architecture of the code base (on which I’m sure any contributors could certainly provide some guidance).
Then there’s also the aim of having people learn rust using lemmy as a practical example as well as the community itself.