Being a Better Programmer: Reading Repos (Such as MAUI)

Many years ago, which seems like an eternity, Scott Allen* an I created a Pluralsight course together. The course was called Being a Better Programmer and is one of my best-selling courses which I assume is largely due to the fact of Scott Allen’s in immaculate reputation. As a software developer you can never stop learning. you can’t stand still in a moving world and technology it’s known to change at a pace that makes it nearly impossible to stay up to date. At the same time, in addition to staying up to date, we are also expected to work hard at becoming a better programmer in more general terms than just knowing the latest tech stack and whatnot. Before I had kids it was easier to find a time to do things such as coding cartas Carmine personal projects, attend conferences and meetups and contribute to open source. So as my life has changed, I’ve also had to change my approach to improving professionally and one of the things I’ve done lately is to immerse myself in other people’s repositories. I use the GitHub app on my phone so I can scroll through issues as if they were social media postings. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time on social media scrolling absentmindedly.

How about replacing some of the doom scrolling with reading that can enhance my software development skills?

The lucky repo is Microsoft MAUI. Because I’m a fan, we use it at work, and it ties in with previous knowledge.

I’ve made my mission to start my day, while eating breakfast, to read through the latest issues and pull requests. I usually pick an issue each day and spend at half an hour or so looking into that issue. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll be able to resolve the issue, and I’ll certainly won’t have the time to create a pull request, but if I spend a little bit of time every single day, I will get to learn this code base more and it will be easier to contribute in the future. Adding a little bit here and a little bit there, it accumulates. And since we are migrating from Xamarin to MAUI at work, it makes this effort even more valuable not just for me but also for my colleagues and our product.

So, my recommendation is to find one of your favorite open-source frameworks or libraries, enable notifications, and make it your mission to immerse yourself in the issues, discussions, pull requests and more. You can do so silently until you feel comfortable replying come on but, in my experience, most open-source software has kind and helpful maintainers that are more than happy to embrace your contribution however small. In addition, for extra learning points, fork the repository and get it working locally. Keep it up to date and try to reproduce reported issues. It’s a fantastic way to learn, and a lot of fun!

This is how you maintain a fork up to date.

If you’d like to contribute to open-source and are looking for easy issues to get started with, check out Up For Grabs!

*Unfortunately, Scott passed away in the year 2020, leaving a void in the hearts of his family, friends and community.

Being a Better Programmer: Reading Repos (Such as MAUI)

Comments