After chatting with Noah S on Twitter, I offered to jot up some thoughts on things that my reduce or eliminate perceived barriers to entry to work on CouchDB.
Here are a few things that I've been able to think of. In the course of researching this mail though, I've actually answered many of my own questions. "serious business" A database seems like the kind of project that only extremely talented people would touch. People depend on the code working. Getting started would require quite a bit of confidence. Am I good enough? "Erlang, wtf" This is a barrier that I've been facing for a while. I'm actually in the process of learning Erlang, trying to expand my horizons from Python. Still, a new language makes it harder to have the required confidence. "I still don't understand rereduce" I'm personally not 100% clear on how queries work. This is even after using the db for a while. I don't want to look like a stupid idiot in front of great developers. Therefore, there's a high risk of offering suggestions and getting told to "RTFM" "Where are the easy bugs?" [solved] "wow, big code base" Is there any documentation on how to project is laid out? Stepping into a new project is always a little daunting. "Apache project?" As someone outside of the ASF, I don't really know what contributing on an Apache project means.
