An article about me and my involvement in the Python community (mainly Django) as a Free Software developer, GNU/Linux user and tech conference sp...
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Interesting read.
Regarding the last paragraph "A thought for all native English-speaking developers". Obviously I do not know what you've gone through. In my own experience in the last 20+ years being online and interacting with all kinds of people from different countries I never really observed that lacking proper English skills was ever a mayor issue. Lets be honest, quite often native English people have poor skills in English too. (Or maybe, technical people quite often struggle with the oddities of natural languages.)
One of the things I have always disliked is when people start with "Excuse my poor English". There is absolutely never a reason to apologize that your second, or third, language isn't that great. Most native English speaking people cannot even formulate a sentence in an other language. Sure they can write code in C, Pascal, Java, Python, Ada, Basic, Fortran, Algol, Prolog, Haskel, Brainfuck, ... but they cannot even say "hello" in French, Spanish, German, or Klingon?!
Get down to brass tacks*, and language will less be an issue. (*) This means, get to the facts. Sling the lingo and it will make up for the lacking skills in English.
PS, English is not my native language either.
Hi Michiel, thanks for your appreciation and for your comment.
I wrote this article and other things in the past, so I'm no longer in the "Excuse my poor English" phase, but actually I was there in the past and had to study a lot to no longer be there.
I made a lot of efforts to complete the university and to be a good software developer, but by the age of 30 I realized that I could read English but I couldn't speak or write it, and this was a real obstacle in being appreciated as a software developer, and in contributing in free software.
I started doing a lot of things to learn English: taking courses, reading articles and books, watching series and videos, listening to podcasts and lectures. I started attending regular meetings to speak in English and I changed the language of all my things: pc, telephone, tv, .... I also lived for a few months in London, and spent a lot of time, effort and money doing this.
In the meantime I worked as a software developer, I had side projects, I studied a lot of technical things, I attended some local technical meetings, national and international conferences and I started giving talks.
I am happy to read and listen about the inclusiveness in these years in the field of Free Software and in various technical conferences and I wanted to highlight another thing that can really exclude you from the community, regardless of how good you are technically.
I hope the native English developers can think more about this, and maybe someone can start adding something related in various "Code of Conduct" of communities, conferences and projects, etc ...
So exactly how long did you wait until you thought you could contribute to Django 🤩 ?
I started using Django 1.3 in 2011 and I did my first pull request in the core of Django in 2017, they merged in Django 2.0 during the DjangoCon Europe 2017. They main problem of finalizing my pull request was about english and not the code.
That's a very long wait 😮😮
Maybe i can learn from you 😅
Or maybe you can start contributing now ;-)
It's not easy for beginners to start contributing in big projects
I have already contributed to some small projects before (doing it now too)
But i m finding it hard to move to some big projects 😓🤯
Take your time and ask help to the community.