Punderline 60: Food for Monkeys

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.

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.

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 think that a lot of what entrepreneurs do is applicable to everyone. Our keen ability to find flaws in the status quo and then to take that initiative to spearhead a solution is something that we should apply to life itself and how we develop goals for ourselves.