EDIT: Since posting, I’ve started such a community: https://lemmy.ml/c/learningrustandlemmy, [email protected]. 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?
That would be an excellent idea. But I feel like an even broader community should be created. Like a generic book club, but for code bases! Could even have a small handful of different code bases on the go at a time. I’d love to get to know lemmy’s, but also e.g. neovim, or even unciv :)
Maybe one day it could even start tackling Moby Dick!
Not sure about a broader community TBH. Depends on what is meant by “reading club”.
If the idea is to look into nuggets or to sort of dip in and out of codebases to find interesting things … then yea, a general community makes sense.
The sort of reading club I’m talking about is more like a study group … for people who are learning but want to get to the point of having practical ability in the language + codebase. For that sort of activity, focusing on the one thing for a bit of time without distractions is actually pretty valuable … plus having a single community with all of the discussions of people learning and figuring things out can turn into a valuable repository of material for newcomers to dig into.
That one’s definitely War and Peace lmao
That’d be a great long term goal but I’d argue a focus on one to begin would be a better idea. If we go full out with many codebase to start we’ll atomize quickly with what might already be a quite small group