As an outsider of the computer science field (I am in design& engineering) who is learning some JavaScript on the side, is there any scope to participate to the Cardano community?
Where would be best to direct my efforts so to learn and at the same time contribute to Cardano or any side projects related to it ?
I guess there is plenty of highly qualified already filling all the gaps but I told was worth a try to ask.
In the meantime I buy ADA and I am active on Twitter rising awareness on Cardano.
You’d be very welcome as a contributor to Cardano Wiki, it could be great if it had one or two more enthusiastic volunteers! And wiki markup is a lot easier to learn than any programming language!
I am a noob coder too if you’re into front end web dev then you have MERN http://mern.io/ to use (and other full stacks) which can be used to create a lot of cool stuff that we would call useful (price, epoch, news). Also, if you want to get into smart contract development, I have a video [VID]Explaining the Gaming smart contract in Plutus that explains the gaming contract (30min and I’m a noob too) so you might be able to imitate and improvise on one of those Plutus core contracts. That would be helpful to me and other noobs if you can learn how to fold a list and accumulate the boolean values to see if they are all true, that would be a lottery contract described here https://github.com/robkorn/plutus-experimental-smart-contracts/blob/master/Games/naiveLottery/naiveLottery.hs
Haskell is a fun language to learn in my opinion so far with folds and lambdas being the heart of the list comprehension. If your curious on how to learn this type of coding, C is a good language to start (as well as python) to learn the ropes of an OOP language, then take your new found knowledge and replace OOP with Functional programming and some OOP keywords with Haskel functional keywords, (arrays = lists)(fold x:xs = i++)(etc) and if you need help with learning, just explore different schools that have a computer programming course and clubs, as well as hackathons. They take all noobs and turn them into junior software developers, I went to a free coding Bootcamp called 42 silicon valley and was kicked out for posting a drudge report article on the slack, but I learned a lot and can recommend it to people. Just don’t talk about politics and you’ll be fine xD (so unfair)
Are you more interested in contributing to wallet software? In that case maybe taking a look at Yoroi (https://github.com/Emurgo/yoroi-frontend) which is also in Javascript and then eventually once you get comfortable, try and contribute something to it. If I recall correctly Emurgo recently released themes for Yoroi, so maybe something really simple to get into contributing with your background might be to release a few custom themes for example.
If you’re interested in Smart Contracts then you can try playing around with Marlowe or Plutus online, which for the current moment are simply in their beginning stages, but that means you’ll already be far ahead of anyone and everyone else when they actually get released on mainnet. The languages aren’t ready for prime-time, but the core mechanics of how it will all work won’t change, so what you learn now will be useful going forward. @smurf123444’s video is one of the first for going through a plutus smart contract in a quick overview sort of fashion, or if you want something more step by step from barebones basics (especially since you are new to programming & haskell) then I’d recommend the lesson I put out a couple months ago on writing your first Plutus SC:
From there I’d recommend trying to create a simple smart contract, whether it’s a simple game of sorts, or anything you can think of. I’m hoping to try and get a Plutus community growing in the near future, so it’d be great to have more people starting to build their own SCs, and overtime once mainnet comes out, we can really work on collaborating and creating something useful
I concur! thanks @bobert for your contributions, and i have learned a lot from your tutorials. It is what taught me data script and redeemer script in a simple to understand and share kinda way. I hope you continue creating as i’m a fan and student!
