-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 4
Getting Started
Librarian-clojure - while being a project that will (eventually) be put into practical use on production, first and foremost serves as a means of providing an opportunity - even for people very new to the Clojure language - to take part in the development of a real web application. Our goal is to create a friendly environment for potential contributors of various skill levels, favouring mostly beginners. The codebase, as it stands, doesn't delve into arcane or experimental language features - we mostly try to hold on to what's in the core of the language. That doesn't mean we won't accept any more advanced concepts, provided there will be a well grounded reasoning behind and clear benefit coming from such addition or modification.
We believe that experiencing development in an environment of a real project is the best catalyst for learning process. It's easier to keep being motivated when the targets are clear and the work done meets a real-world feedback from other contributors.
"Why not contribute to one of many well-grounded, existing projects then?", you may ask. You may be partly right. Some people like to and have no problem with jumping right into the deep end. However, there are also the ones who hesitate, because they have a feeling of not being ready yet. The ones who are afraid (rationally or not, that's a different matter) of negative reaction to their attempts at contributing. Such people often dig through plethora of blog posts, guides, tutorials or books trying to hone their skills and knowledge on a given topic in hopes of achieving a "sufficient" level of experience - to feel comfortable with showing anything to the outside world. Often, somewhere along the way, the fire of motivation dwindles, because there's no joy in struggling in solitarity with problems made up for the sake of example. There's no feeling of accomplishment, when the work done is not put into something that will not be seen and used by anyone but the author.
We aim at helping the latter ones. Contributions in every form to every aspect of the project - be it a small fix, a simple cosmetic change or even just a typo correction in docs or code - are warmly welcomed. Everyone are encouraged to try their hand at making the project even just a little bit better. We can assure that nobody will be laughed at for any sort of error or misconception on his side - there won't be pointing fingers at anyone. What you can be sure of is that we will strive to provide a constructive and friendly feedback, should any issues arise.
We assume that even an absolute beginner should be able to start fiddling with the codebase almost right from beginning. However, we recommend to get some rudimentary knowledge about Clojure itself as well as about using it in the context of web development. Even if you're not going to take part in development of that project, we still encourage you to check the links below, especially the screencast. Who knows, maybe it will whet your appetite for more?