Feeling energetic, or is that just the coffee?

As my current interests keep chopping and changing so much, and I don't feel like I should blog until I get settled in to a particular thing, I end up never blogging. So I'm going to start blogging more, even if I haven't fully found my feet in a particular area. This may bean my posts end up being a bit half baked, but at least I will actually blog! So on with my first uncooked, possible indigestible post...

Over the weekend I saw a friend, and I pestered him about things he knows a lot about. Also he, and his wife, gave me some good advice about life in general, and I've started this week feeling much more alive and ready to put my energy in to something, that doesn't just benefit me. I've been thinking for while that I'd like to contribute to an open source project, but it has been hard to find something that I feel I can contribute to. I'm still suffering from feeling very much under qualified, and in no way 1337 enough to contribute any project, let alone one like Mono that is a fairly big, well known one.

I'm going to start off with the basics, familiarise myself with the code base, maybe contribute a small bug fix or a documentation contribution. I'm currently grabbing the sources, and I'll have a look at them, and try to compile them on my MacBook later this evening. As I'm a Mac user by night I'm hoping that that might be something I can contribute, in particular improving MonoDevelop on Mac. Obviously anything like that is a long way off, but if I blog it here, I might actually stick to it, and overcome my inability to persevere at something.

I like the idea of contributing to Mono as it feels like it draws together several of my interests:

• I like C#, in fact it might be my current favourite language, but
• I'm a Mac user
• I'm interested in language / framework design and implementation
• I'm keen to learn more C++

So, my plan is to document my mini-adventure in to this project. Maybe it'll be of use to someone else, or at least be a reference for me.

Ok, so as I said I've been trying to get the sources over from the svn repo as I've been writing this. But what do you know, it is taking a long time, it's a big project... surprise, surprise! (Considering I like to thinking of myself as being fairly clever, I do amuse myself by how thick I can be sometimes.) Anyway, I got hold of sources from here as per the site. I'll have a play tonight, and let you know how I get on.