Why I contribute more to Julia

The more I look at my own text below, the more skeptical I get whether it is a useful post. But I throw it out just to see what others think …

I like this discussion above. Julia is a great achievement with a lot of potential. A big thanks to all who are contributing. This cannot be said too often!

As pointed out in the previous posts, it´s really valuable that people can contribute easily: improving code and documentation, help others…

I have been using Julia for about one year, and I am a bit stuck in my learning and abilty to contribute. There are a two educational things I miss currently:

  • There are a lot of very good resources available for learning apart from the Julia docs and blogs, like the stochastic lifestyle and intro to julia contributions to name a few, explaining general Julia programming techniques. Thanks for the effort!!! I read them, learn a lot and sometimes think that I can improve upon them. Would it be possible and helpful to start a github organisation (something like JuliaInfo, JuliaLearning or JuliaTutorial) where some information is collected? If yes, would it be possible to use documenter.jl for tracking which example code gets outdated? Or better with notebooks? Perhaps this is useful because: (1) people like me who want to contribute have a natural starting point for learning how to do this by using Julia and git to improve tutorials, (2) some useful information would be somewhat more centralized, (3) hopefully the community will keep the code examples up-to-date and improve upon explanations etc relieving the original contributer from some of the effort, and (4) such a place could also hold information such as discussed about Julia intro presentations.

  • I like video blog posts, so I just want to encourage people to do more of them for Julia. For example, it would be nice if people who have written a useful package explain their code: design choices, programming techniques… JuliaCon videos are great.

I hope this post does not divert too far from the original topic “Why I contribute more to Julia”. Final note, my suggestion is probably already sufficiently covered by the julialang homepage, the Julia wikibook etc… so it might be redudant… and yet another source of info…

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