Question

I’m a young (highschool next year) beginner programmer, currently learning Python and starting to do some really small projects, like creating a contact form with and without django and plan to eventually do some bigger ones, like creating a lightweight texteditor (think notepad).

I would like to eventually get into helping out with Open Source projects, and I am wondering if other developers will be able to take me seriously if I am young? I don’t want them to baby me, and I don’t want them just completely ignore me because “I’m a kid so I don’t know anything.”

Do you think other developers would take a -really- young programmer seriously?

Would you take a young programmer seriously?

Answer 1

“Devoting some care to your writing will pay off hugely,” according to Karl Fogel, who retold this story in his book:

Back in 1993, I was working for the Free Software Foundation, and we were beta-testing version 19 of GNU Emacs. We’d make a beta release every week or so, and people would try it out and send us bug reports. There was this one guy whom none of us had met in person but who did great work: his bug reports were always clear and led us straight to the problem, and when he provided a fix himself, it was almost always right. He was top-notch.

Now, before the FSF can use code written by someone else, we have them do some legal paperwork to assign their copyright interest to that code to the FSF. Just taking code from complete strangers and dropping it in is a recipe for legal disaster.

So I emailed the guy the forms, saying, “Here’s some paperwork we need, here’s what it means, you sign this one, have your employer sign that one, and then we can start putting in your fixes. Thanks very much.”

He sent me back a message saying, “I don’t have an employer.”

So I said, “Okay, that’s fine, just have your university sign it and send it back.”

After a bit, he wrote me back again, and said, “Well, actually… I’m thirteen years old and I live with my parents.”