Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

There are loads of friendly and welcoming OpenSource communities.

I'm sorry you did not stumble into them, but instead in the few hostile ones. It's a pity that made you give up.

A general tip, I give to people wishing to contribute to OSS is to first watch from the sideline. Read issues, threads, subscribe to an ML etc. Then to ask. Don't just throw in PR or feature request, but ask: is this welcome? How do you work? Any particular details that you wish me to pay extra attention to (tabs, spaces, tests, documentation, design).

As a FLOSS maintainer myself, it can be very intimidating to have someone throw a PR at you that rewrites everything (it comes across as: you suck, your software sucks, but watch me fix all that), or that disregards things that I deem critical (tests, architecture) It is really hard to review it, without coming across as an arrogant bastard. And often software that I put on a back burner will require me significant effort to get back into. So merging a simple typo fix or dependency update might cost half a day, just to get the dev env back up.



I certainly wasn't arrogant with the last one.

Hey dudes, there's a pointer dereferencing crash here which occurs when I do X, Y then Z. Added one line change to fix it. SILENCE.

There are no test cases for most projects either.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: