What is cbrtl?

cbrtl is an attempt at creating a tight knit group of programmers to showcase and collaborate on fun projects.

What do we do here?

  • Create fun projects. Either in groups or in isolation.
  • Organize community and online showcases for group and individual projects.
  • Contribute to Open Source projects both in cbrtl and in other communities.
  • Conduct code reviews and JAMs.
  • Share resources to learn.
  • Create and maintain dev-journals and blogs.

What is the end goal?

Merely to promote Open Source culture and proper software development

How far down the road are we?

Not that far, the egg has just been laid. As of the time of writing this post, we have just started out. For the effort to work out, we welcome interested folks over :)

What can I do?

Just what you’ve been doing so far, but with more people!

If you have any interesting projects that you have already been working on, let us know and we’ll put them on the cbrtl page for more people to see. Note that there is some criteria that projects must qualify, some of these are intentionally vague. But as long as you’re doing more than following a course or tutorial, it’s likely to be accepted :)

Volunteering to cbrtl

We are looking for volunteers for some roles. Note however, that there is no strict mandate for responsibilities. As long as you’re capable of adding something of value, no matter how small, shoot us a message! We’re looking for some help with:

  • Code reviewers: If you have experience contributing to FOSS or writing code for user/developer facing products, perhaps you can volunteer and help us out here :)

  • Editors: We plan on writing frequent blog posts. But both the technical content and the english material can use a second pair of eyes to help catch mistakes or inconsistent writing. If you have done some technical writing before, you can volunteer for reviewing the content in blog posts!

  • Technical Writers: If you have experience writing code but are usually on a tight schedule, you may be able to join us and share your knowledge. We want to mandate a high quality in our posts, so any tutorial/how-to guide that has been done a million times before is generally discouraged. We want to avoid redundant topics like “How to build a todo app with React” and promote posts and dev-logs / journals that are fun to read and explore.

  • Frontend devs: Currently, the cbrtl website is bland and not-so-catchy. While minimalism is the core idea, we can definitely use some front-end developers to help keep the UI fresh, responsive and modern.

  • Moderators: To help keep the community together on discord and github.

NOTE We do not expect any amount of time commitment from volunteers, as long as you can make small contributions, we appreciate it. Volunteering is not druge work, and active frequent contributions are appreciated, but not required.

The kind of software we want to write

We firmly believe in re-inventing the wheel. Writing software close to the metal helps us closely understand the behind-the-scenes of software that most take for granted. While any creative project is welcome, here are some ideas that adhere to the spirit:

  • Compilers
  • Virtual Machines and Interpreters
  • Game Engines
  • Operating Systems
  • Search Engines
  • Database engines
  • Voxel renderers
  • TCP/IP stack
  • VCS
  • Web servers
  • Web browsers
  • Text editors
  • Anything else that is NOT a react todo app, or a vue planner app, or a terminal tic-tac-toe game.

All of these are but regular software that we tend to take for granted, that can be (and have been) written from scratch. We encourage all kinds of creative projects no matter how basic. But you can expect the above group projects to come to life as the community grows.

Showcasing your project

This post has more on that. If you want to showcase your project on our github org, then reach out to us on discord or the mailing list.