Rookies in the Bike Shed
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Rookies in the Bike Shed
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed
#2The Rails commit that spurred this post, apparently: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/5329
Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed
#3This post raises some interesting points about the difficulty of contributing to open source for the first time. Over the last year, I've taught myself to code. I want to contribute to open source, and I think I can provide value to smaller projects. But the public nature and unique culture of open source have left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. So I observe instead.
What's the best way for a rookie to find small, welcoming open-source projects to contribute to?
Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed
#4The Rails commit that spurred this post, apparently: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/5329
Bah, I can't be bothered to read the whole thing. Before the request was closed, if I understood correctly, the argument was about whether or not `xhr?` needed to return a boolean rather than what it's doing which is aliasing a regex match.
Hmm, call it bike-shedding if you want, but I have to be honest part of the beauty and value of Ruby is how semantic it can be made when you follow some conventions. How hard or awful is it to just actually return a boolean here? I mean is anyone expecting or relying on the clearly undocumented feature that it also returns the offset of where `/XMLHttpRequest/i` is found in the request?
The problem with throwing out the 'bikeshedding' defence is that it goes both ways. It's their choice to fight a small, trivial pull request that appears to make logical sense, and arguably reduces the potential for cognitive friction.
It's debatable who's actually bikeshedding here.
Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed
#5This post raises some interesting points about the difficulty of contributing to open source for the first time. Over the last year, I've taught myself to code. I want to contribute to open source, and I think I can provide value to smaller projects. But the public nature and unique culture of open source have left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. So I observe instead. What's the best way for a rookie to find small, wel…
Find a small project you use for something you're building. Do you run into any issues with using it, that could be improved? Improve those and send a pull request. Make your first commit small and obvious.
Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed
#6This post raises some interesting points about the difficulty of contributing to open source for the first time. Over the last year, I've taught myself to code. I want to contribute to open source, and I think I can provide value to smaller projects. But the public nature and unique culture of open source have left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. So I observe instead. What's the best way for a rookie to find small, wel…
Find a "small" project is probably best. I've contributed to probably over a dozen opensource projects on Github in the past year or so. I highly encourage you to find a few that you use and like. They don't even have to be really small, but I'd probably avoid projects like Ruby, Rails or the Linux kernel for now.
Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed
#7The Rails commit that spurred this post, apparently: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/5329
Bah, I can't be bothered to read the whole thing. Before the request was closed, if I understood correctly, the argument was about whether or not `xhr?` needed to return a boolean rather than what it's doing which is aliasing a regex match. Hmm, call it bike-shedding if you want, but I have to be honest part of the beauty and value of Ruby is how semantic it can be made when you follow some conventions. How hard or a…
Dude, that's deep. You're bike shedding the bike shed. So meta. Turtles all the way down. Touché!
Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed
#8The Rails commit that spurred this post, apparently: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/5329
Bah, I can't be bothered to read the whole thing. Before the request was closed, if I understood correctly, the argument was about whether or not `xhr?` needed to return a boolean rather than what it's doing which is aliasing a regex match. Hmm, call it bike-shedding if you want, but I have to be honest part of the beauty and value of Ruby is how semantic it can be made when you follow some conventions. How hard or a…
This happens all the time, and I'd argue, is the source of what many consider bike shed issues, even when they're not.
An essential element of a bike shed disagreement is that the matter being discussed must be trivial. That is, the color of a bike shed doesn't matter. It has no impact on the utility of the bike shed. This is a function before form viewpoint.
Ah, but if real life were only so black & white.
In practice, triviality is a sliding scale. The presence of the offset is only trivial if you're not using it. So, to some people, it's a bike shed issue. To others, it's a matter of breaking lots of code. Clearly not a bike shed.
Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bah, I can't be bothered to read the whole thing. Before the request was closed, if I understood correctly, the argument was about whether or not `xhr?` needed to return a boolean rather than what it's doing which is aliasing a regex match. Hmm, call it bike-shedding if you want, but I have to be honest part of the beauty and value of Ruby is how semantic it can be made when you follow some conventions. How hard or a…
Dude, that's deep. You're bike shedding the bike shed. So meta. Turtles all the way down. Touché!
Fair enough, I wont argue with your elastic defence ;).
Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed
#10This post raises some interesting points about the difficulty of contributing to open source for the first time. Over the last year, I've taught myself to code. I want to contribute to open source, and I think I can provide value to smaller projects. But the public nature and unique culture of open source have left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. So I observe instead. What's the best way for a rookie to find small, wel…
Try to get into a bugmash of some kind. I started this way with Rails and I wrote about it http://www.rohitarondekar.com/articles/my-first-rails-bugmas...
Many companies and tech groups have these around the world during meetups and conferences.
But most importantly dont let this pull request fool you. Rails is nice to contribute to even if you are starting out and the rails core team especially jose valim and santiago pastorino are super helpful.