We recently had the pleasure of hosting Liyas Thomas, the Founder and Maintainer of Hoppscotch, on our Open Source Friday stream. Liyas gave us so many insights about being a developer, building a product, and learning to code. We wanted to share all his knowledge with you so no one misses out.
Consistency is the key
If there's something you want to do, and do well, you need to stick at it. Liyas says if you want to learn to code, you need to do it every day. If you want to build a cool product, service, or business, you need to do it every day. Want to be part of the open source community? Then you need to be constantly active.
Taking a look at Liyas' GitHub profile, we can see this is definitely true. Look at all those contributions! Also kudos to Liyas on his epic Readme PROFILE.
While being consistent and always being active is one thing, you need to be consistent in the right manner. Let's take a look a couple of the top tips Liyas gave us when it comes to coding and open source. Remember, everything he is talking about below requires consistency.
Open Source is your ticket to coding
I've talked about it in a lot of my recent Dev.to posts... and that's learning to code. It can often be scary. We've spoken about how to learn through Hacktoberfest, getting involved in open source for learning, as well as learning by streaming online. But what we haven't heard much about, is learning by simply starting a project from scratch.
Rather than jumping in on an existing open source project, you can learn to code by doing. That's exactly what Liyas did. Yes, he had experience with other languages. However, Liyas however decided to write Hoppscotch in Vue JS, simply because he wanted to learn Vue JS. Vue is a great language to write and you can grasp the concepts relatively quickly.
00:59
Learning Vue JS and building a website in less than 3 hours
Michelle Duke ・ Aug 26 '20
Jumping in and coding a new project simply because you want to learn the language seems like something insane. Liyas however said it's not. He believes building software should be a learning curve. And the community is here to help. He says the developer community is very knowledgeable and talented. You just need to ask. Liyas says people need to be not afraid - "Don't be ashamed about asking for help".
If you ask for help you will receive it. There's lots of developers, maintainers, and contributors who are here to help. That's how Liyas was able to build Hoppscotch into what it is today. Because he asked for help. And if you want to learn to code, then don't be ashamed to ask for help!
00:30
Get involved in Open Source because the Maintainers will help you
Michelle Duke for GitHub ・ Sep 25 '20
Promoting your open source project
Something super important, but many developers often forget, is promoting your work. Products and services are amazing. What we all build is awesome. However, even if you have the best product in the world, it's useless if no one knows about it.
Liyas gave us top tips on how to make your project successful. He says you need to promote, and "shamelessly self promote". If you don't promote your work, no one will know about it. He said find your audience, wherever they are, and show off your work. Communities like Subreddits, Discord Servers, news sites, and yes of course, Dev.to!
And remember, Liyas says you need to be consistent. Every day, week, month... make sure you're posting and interacting with your community. That's the way to make your voice heard.
Join us for Open Source Friday
If you enjoyed this short write up, check out the video recording to hear Liyas in all his glory.
We'd also love you to join us live for these sessions. If you do, you'll can interact with other cool developers and ask questions to our guest speakers. Follow us on our GitHub Twitch Channel and join our Virtual Meetup Group we post all our live streams with information on which guests and projects will be appearing next.
Looking forward to seeing you in a live session. Good luck with your coding journey.
Top comments (6)
Absolutely agree regarding just jumping in head first when trying to learn. The first program I ever wrote on my own was a 1000 line spaghetti code disaster in Python but I learned more in those three days then I did in an entire semester of sitting in lecture
He is exactly what he said. Liyas is constantly super active on GitHub. I had a contribution in his project as a part of my Hacktoberfest contribution this year. He is really really inspiring.
Yeah having time off definitely helps. Who knows what types of contributions are coming on weekends. They could be minor. But also remember startup founders often don't take time off either. If you want to be successful, sometimes you have to go all in at the start.
I just saw on the Postwoman site "Postwoman is now Hoppscotch", so I'm curious how that fits in to the story of Hoppscotch...
Liyas briefly explains it in the interview. Watch the recording uploaded to YouTube.
Cool thanks - I'll check it out!