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Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

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221–230 of 293 posts

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really the correct answer: Why do you want to participate in an open-source project in the first place? If it's to gain brownie points for your CV, it's quite likely that you'll get nowhere, because that's a motivation right along with "earn money". The difference to just getting a random software development job for earning money is that at the random job, you will be in a team where tasks will naturally flo…

This, so much this. Working on Open Source absolutely requires individual contributors to be self-starting. New contributors who lack drive require constant direction and/or hand-holding, undermining the time/effort commitment of existing contributors. Most Open Source projects invest a lot of time/effort coaching new contributors. If a new contributor receives the coaching but doesn't produce anything useful; it's a…

I have somewhat different perspectives on "ideas". People discuss ideas first because if they do the implementation first, there is a large risk of wasted effort because it "may not follow the intent of the project". Discussion is in part effort to divine the intent of the project.

As a concrete example, I implemented break and continue for OCaml compiler because having for loop without break/continue seems to me obviously a bad idea. Although I learned a lot about OCaml compiler internals, this went nowhere. I learned my lesson, and now I will certainly "endlessly discuss" possibilities of break/continue first, without writing a single line of code. In my opinion, berating people for this is placing undue burden on contributors.

http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2008/04/ce14d...

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#224
post #200
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate and delicious irony of your comment is that you endorse a behavior that is in and of itself toxic -- publicly crucifying somebody because you don't agree with their beliefs. This line of thinking is not only dangerous, it's downright disgusting.

The flip side, which you seem to endorse, is that people should have no way to censure (in the realm of public discourse or social opinion, not any legal sense) those whose views they don't agree with. Obviously, Eich had some widely unpopular views, and much of the country didn't agree with his beliefs. No one sued him, no one jailed him, people who didn't agree with him on a widely-debated social issue of the day j…

Yes. In my opinion, as long as someone doesn't try to preach KKK value in the community or come to community gathering wearing KKK robe, whether someone donates to KKK is beyond discussion.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#225
post #74

Drupal's community is what got me into OSS, even though the language (PHP) community seems to be at a strange crossroads currently. I've also been somewhat involved in Ansible's community, and it's been nothing but a positive experience so far. It's interesting to compare some of the different communities; some seem to value technical competence over diversity, some UX over architecture, etc. It's probably easiest to…

Quite funny, but I had an experience with Ansible that's similar to the one the other commenter had with Drupal. I have a very trivial pull request[0] which I have been trying to get reviewed & merged since March. It's only around 20 lines of code, but I've been asked to rebase it due to merge conflicts multiple times. I did so, but nothing came out of it on either of those occasions. [0]: https://github.com/ansible/…

Yeah, that's the risk with having a process with exactly one reviewer for a component. There really should be some way to have someone else take over if the main maintainer isn't able to complete it.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#226
Open edX, the stack powering edX.org, is a very interesting (and useful!) project to contribute to. The community and the reviewers are very friendly. There are byte-sized tasks available to get started, and you will get guidance on the tickets and PRs. It's a large Django code base, and changes you make impact millions of students within a week - as real and concrete as it gets. : )

https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING...

http://bit.ly/edxbugs

http://open.edx.org/

http://github.com/edx/edx-platform/

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#228
post #217
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate and delicious irony of your comment is that you endorse a behavior that is in and of itself toxic -- publicly crucifying somebody because you don't agree with their beliefs. This line of thinking is not only dangerous, it's downright disgusting.

"you endorse a behavior that is in and of itself toxic -- publicly crucifying somebody because you don't agree with their beliefs... it's downright disgusting." Lol, didn't take you long to become a hypocrite on that one! But seriously, "someone" and "CEO of a major corporation that relies on its good image" are different things. We rightly hold them to different standards. Holding unpopular (and exclusionary) politi…

I disagree sempai. Holding a CEO to a different standard than a common employee is a recipe for elitism.

I will reiterate that a person's beliefs have no bearing on their ability.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust's IRC channel is amazing - supportive, thoughtful, and non-condescending. This is in sharp contrast to the Go one, which is an absolute cesspit.

Thankfully (but still unfortunately), the Go community Slack does a great job of replacing the IRC channel with more civilized/productive discussion. The IRC channel, like many, is often not a friendly place.

If this is the case, I think Go people should remove IRC and add Slack from this page: https://golang.org/help/

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

meta-meta-discussion: The question implies an ordering on priorities: 1) kind 2) supportive 3) talented 4) effective Granted, the original poster may not have intended it quite that strongly, but it raises an important issue when evaluating open source projects.

Not necessarily. For example, OP might figure effectiveness is easy to judge from a quick Google search and it's the other things that benefit more from asking about personal experiences.

What about my post are you saying "not necessarily" to?
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