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Comment by compay | Hacker News Reader

Being a hack to make a living sucks, but hey - everybody has to pay the bills. So there's no need to apologize or feel ashamed.

If you find yourself bored silly with your programming gig, do yourself and other people a favor. Get involved in an open source project you like and feel you can make a contribution to. You'll probably start to enjoy programming again, and other people will benefit too.

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Regarding interesting open source projects, can anyone recommend an open source project that contributing to would teach me about real-life, effective usage of:

(1). git source control

(2). maintaining a medium sized/complexity Java project

I'm interested in the oral tradition i.e. the human operational aspects of how you use it, what aspect to use it in what circumstances etc, etc, etc - that aren't in the tool itself or its man pages or tutorials. Thanks for any pointers.

I can't recommend a particular project, but looking through [1] for something which catches your eye would be a good start.

[1] http://github.com/search?q=java

thanks for that

Whatever it is, start small. Smaller patches can be very useful and are also more likely to give you the satisfaction of being accepted. Even just correcting typos or grammar in a README can be useful as long as you're not a jerk about how you submit it to the original author. :-)

Github definitely makes contributing to open source very easy, so I'd recommend you start looking there. They also have some well-written practical guides to working with Git here:

http://github.com/guides

I might be a bit ashamed ... it's a big shock to find yourself on the path to nowhere when you feel you have so much more potential, hence the article.

I'm definitely on the lookout for something I might like more.

Don't feel like you have to do crazy low level stuff to be a good programmer. It's a big, diverse field and you can leave your mark wherever you want, and still have it be valued by others. Work on what gets you excited and makes you want to work hard, whether that's websites in PHP or a math library in assembly. You'll do your best work that way. And if you're good at your niche, you'll probably be able to find work doing what you love.

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