EDIT: Since posting, I've started such a community: https://lemmy.ml/c/learningrustandlemmy, !learningrustandlemmy@lemmy.ml. 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?
Honestly the idea sounds fantastic, I'm just not sure I'd pick Lemmy as the codebase to do it with. There are some software projects that are worth some serious study -- Chromium, Wordpress, Linux kernel, git, Redis, Python, lichess. Just because Lemmy is in Rust doesn't automatically mean it's great code.
I'm not saying it's not good code or trying to talk down on the level of accomplishment or anything, just you got a whole symphony of pretty outstanding options to choose from.
Oh for sure ... I agree the idea is generally applicable to lots of things.
I'm suggesting one for the codebase we happen to be relying on right here for those interested. Part of the significance being, for those interested ... the project leads are admins/mods here too, so some good feedback loops could be brought up, where the idea is to actually practically contribute in the end.
But I agree, as an idea, there are plenty of other candidates.
Yeah, makes sense. Overall I think the idea is a great one. Reading existing code is a thing that's vital for learning how to write good code, and for some reason it's not a real big part of "how to make software" education.