Friday, December 09, 2005

Why is open-source good for learners?

It is widely agreed that the best way to learn about something is to teach it.

By opening up the source of a project, you're actually teaching the people who'd read your code, how you solved the problems that you encountered in your project.

Everybody understands that there’s a lot to learn about programming by reading other people's code, but in fact you would also learn a lot by starting an open-source project, in the same way as you'd learn about a topic by teaching it to someone.

So start hacking an open-source project today even though you might not have attained God status yet in the technologies required for its implementation. Don’t worry about the mistakes you’d make as your ascent towards God status would continue with your hacking.