Why I love hacking at LibreOffice

Oh! I wasn't expecting this to get onto HN :-)

If anyone wants to contribute to LibreOffice, hope onto Freenode #libreoffice-dev and say hi :-) it's a massive project, but there are bite sized projects that you can tackle, and even if you struggle at first nobody will mind. It's a fun project, so give it a try!

Any Australians in Sydney who might be interested in hacking at LO, let me know!

> the incremental improvements have been increasing at a rate of knots and folks are beginning to notice the positive effects

Right on. I see this at $DAY_JOB too; after a certain amount of cleanup and dead code deletion and whatnot suddenly things start getting implemented faster, small bugs are fixed more easily, TODOs and FIXMEs start disappearing from the codebase, etc. Good stuff!

I had to install LibreOffice recently to generate some forms and PDFs and I was very impressed. It's come a long way since I last messed with it several years ago. Makes me want to contribute but it's been way too long since I last touched C++ and I'm mostly a Java developer now.

tl;dr? The people. The author indicates that the LibreOffice community is filled with people of good humour who help those not as expert as themselves.

I love hacking on LibreOffice because nobody else lets me do static analysis on 10 million lines of code and make it better. Most places just throw up their hands in despair and become too afraid to touch anything.

Also, the people are great!

I'm the guy Chris mentioned who noted 5.0 feeling noticeably faster than 4.4 (because they cleaned up the VCL timers) and how fascinating the details of a project doing an apparently-boring job can be :-)

Its a pretty important project.

I wonder what the simplest changes to the codebase are that would make it much smaller. I wonder if there are tools that would make suggestions.

For people who want to get involved, is there a list of starting points? (like low hanging fruit type of tickets to get into the codebase)

what programming languages do i need to know to hack on libreoffice?