You have done such an amazing job on this, it's been such a joy watching you improve SCTP. Better Bandwidth Estimation has been the big list of things everyone has been wishing could be better for 5+ years.
I can't wait to see where your going/what you end up building :) I absolutely didn't have the skills you had at this point in my career.
-----
* What is the best way to get people interested/involved in Open Source/contributing? I am always looking to attract more people. What is Pion doing right and what could it be doing better?
* Doing this project what was the most surprising technical thing you learned? I haven't gone deep on Bandwidth Estimation, but it's super cool to me that loss + latency are really just heuristics. I get why it isn't possible, but it's a shame middle boxes can't just tell software 'You can send this much' :)
Upvoted on Hackernews, Starred on Github, Read your github about page, Starred that and joined the discord server.
As another youngster (17 years to be exact) who was (Might I still add, "is") worried about both the college aspects of things and the job aspect.
Your post gave me assurance that there is a way to make it, that there is hope in its own way.
Really influential, Mad respects goes to you and I wish you all the best moving forward in life in all of your journeys whether coding or not and wishing you a although early, happy new year man!
I have a few questions but you mentioned that you met JoeTurki, Where do you exactly meet such people, On hackernews (I am presuming you have created a new account?)
Because one of the ways that I find software, perhaps even software I can contribute once I get good enough and learn the fundamentals (honestly I am a gopher head too :) ) but some projects are written in C so perhaps I will learn that just to contribute to some/read them to maybe even rewrite them in golang perhaps but those are other ideas.
So the approach I make is probably hackernews -> good project -> gives me ideas/github projects -> I search for ideas when any problem comes in my head -> I then find github projects which are interesting -> I join their discord server -> I chat with their creator.
I think this has only happened in 1 project to be fair (librisc-V), I really love the elegance of librisc-V and I appreciate the creator of that project a lot too
So I am interested in how you meet people, because although one can get in discussions with hackernews with some pretty good people, I sometimes think that the discussion is rather limited in context so there's that and thus I am interested with this.
You mentioned "I decided I’d try for a different strategy: I got involved in an open source project related to video streaming", so I am fairly interested in how you decided to "jump in"/ try since I feel like this advice might help me
Also once again, The project is really good and I hope more open source projects can perhaps be built on top of it, and I genuinely hope you a nice day man!
I'm happy to hear that you were encouraged by my story :) It can definitely be scary to begin with contributing to open source projects but I would recommend trying to find a place to start that 1) has an active community with people you can actively talk to and 2) find a project that you find interesting enough to care about.
An active community is really important: just a year ago Pion had very little activity until Joe picked it up as a maintainer and was an incredible person to talk to, including countless questions about almost everything. I'm really not exaggerating, I was able to do this with almost 0 prior knowledge on Go and video streaming. Part of working with open-source is luck based though; not all projects make it, and people are working on things in their free time. I would try to see how active people are and also how nice they are, because if the maintainers are toxic then realistically speaking, you probably wont be working on the project for a long time even if you found it interesting.
Honestly my strategy sounds really simple, it's basically saying "just do x", which is half of it. My mentality going into it was to try something. If I didn't like it, I would just drop it and move on, but if I did like it (for example, finding a project interesting enough to help out with, or a fun group of people to work with, or just a place to help with small things outside of work) then I would tag along for the ride. Another way to look at it is that by contributing, even just a little bit, you don't have to be responsible for an entire project. Being able to make tiny changes can still be meaningful because it forces you to have to understand the other parts of the codebase, as well as why the changes are necessary in the first place. And if you're ever unsure about either of those, that's where the community part comes in: asking questions is key!
It's important to remember that most open-source projects are just things that people work on in their free time. While it is fun, sometimes people get busy, which is why it's nice to have multiple projects to contribute to. It also gives you a chance to meet new people, that can be from joining whatever chat they're using (like discord), making posts like these to show off things that you've made, requesting reviews from maintainers, etc.
Luckily for me, Pion ended up being a place where I found something to do and was given the time and tools to make something cool!
You have done such an amazing job on this, it's been such a joy watching you improve SCTP. Better Bandwidth Estimation has been the big list of things everyone has been wishing could be better for 5+ years.
I can't wait to see where your going/what you end up building :) I absolutely didn't have the skills you had at this point in my career.
-----
* What is the best way to get people interested/involved in Open Source/contributing? I am always looking to attract more people. What is Pion doing right and what could it be doing better?
* Doing this project what was the most surprising technical thing you learned? I haven't gone deep on Bandwidth Estimation, but it's super cool to me that loss + latency are really just heuristics. I get why it isn't possible, but it's a shame middle boxes can't just tell software 'You can send this much' :)
If you want to read about my personal background and how I ended up working on Pion: https://gist.github.com/philipch07/1ec05c103c7b85f2d43399a70...
Upvoted on Hackernews, Starred on Github, Read your github about page, Starred that and joined the discord server.
As another youngster (17 years to be exact) who was (Might I still add, "is") worried about both the college aspects of things and the job aspect.
Your post gave me assurance that there is a way to make it, that there is hope in its own way.
Really influential, Mad respects goes to you and I wish you all the best moving forward in life in all of your journeys whether coding or not and wishing you a although early, happy new year man!
I have a few questions but you mentioned that you met JoeTurki, Where do you exactly meet such people, On hackernews (I am presuming you have created a new account?)
Because one of the ways that I find software, perhaps even software I can contribute once I get good enough and learn the fundamentals (honestly I am a gopher head too :) ) but some projects are written in C so perhaps I will learn that just to contribute to some/read them to maybe even rewrite them in golang perhaps but those are other ideas.
So the approach I make is probably hackernews -> good project -> gives me ideas/github projects -> I search for ideas when any problem comes in my head -> I then find github projects which are interesting -> I join their discord server -> I chat with their creator.
I think this has only happened in 1 project to be fair (librisc-V), I really love the elegance of librisc-V and I appreciate the creator of that project a lot too
So I am interested in how you meet people, because although one can get in discussions with hackernews with some pretty good people, I sometimes think that the discussion is rather limited in context so there's that and thus I am interested with this.
You mentioned "I decided I’d try for a different strategy: I got involved in an open source project related to video streaming", so I am fairly interested in how you decided to "jump in"/ try since I feel like this advice might help me
Also once again, The project is really good and I hope more open source projects can perhaps be built on top of it, and I genuinely hope you a nice day man!
I'm happy to hear that you were encouraged by my story :) It can definitely be scary to begin with contributing to open source projects but I would recommend trying to find a place to start that 1) has an active community with people you can actively talk to and 2) find a project that you find interesting enough to care about.
An active community is really important: just a year ago Pion had very little activity until Joe picked it up as a maintainer and was an incredible person to talk to, including countless questions about almost everything. I'm really not exaggerating, I was able to do this with almost 0 prior knowledge on Go and video streaming. Part of working with open-source is luck based though; not all projects make it, and people are working on things in their free time. I would try to see how active people are and also how nice they are, because if the maintainers are toxic then realistically speaking, you probably wont be working on the project for a long time even if you found it interesting.
Honestly my strategy sounds really simple, it's basically saying "just do x", which is half of it. My mentality going into it was to try something. If I didn't like it, I would just drop it and move on, but if I did like it (for example, finding a project interesting enough to help out with, or a fun group of people to work with, or just a place to help with small things outside of work) then I would tag along for the ride. Another way to look at it is that by contributing, even just a little bit, you don't have to be responsible for an entire project. Being able to make tiny changes can still be meaningful because it forces you to have to understand the other parts of the codebase, as well as why the changes are necessary in the first place. And if you're ever unsure about either of those, that's where the community part comes in: asking questions is key!
It's important to remember that most open-source projects are just things that people work on in their free time. While it is fun, sometimes people get busy, which is why it's nice to have multiple projects to contribute to. It also gives you a chance to meet new people, that can be from joining whatever chat they're using (like discord), making posts like these to show off things that you've made, requesting reviews from maintainers, etc.
Luckily for me, Pion ended up being a place where I found something to do and was given the time and tools to make something cool!