Punderline 17: A source of tension

I’m often surprised by the grand expectations that younger coders believe is necessary for success at Hackathon events. Here, in no particular order, are some of the most common misconceptions and tips I’ve learned.

Midway changed a lot from its humble beginnings as a simple prototype to the complex extension it is now. Let’s explore how it changed. Check out the latest version of the extension on the Chrome Web Store.

Recently, I was trying to figure out a way to create my own arbitrary precision floating point arithmetic library. For those of you unaware, floating point simply means numbers are represented in scientific notation and that allows computers to express really large or really small numbers and everything in between. However, one problem of floating point numbers is that they are normally represented with a limited amount of precision.

I admit, I used to think contributing to Firefox was basically impossible, especially as someone who didn’t yet know Rust or C++. And even if I overcame this hurdle, I thought it was hard to get set up, difficult to find bugs that are well-scoped to what I can actually accomplish given my skillset, and challenging to understand the complex codebases that would be typical of large software projects. But I wanted to help. And after hacking Google Chrome, I realized that maybe I could, or at least I could try.