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I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

skeptrune.com

11–20 of 218 posts

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#11

> It reminds me of George Hotz’s legendary single week at Twitter in 2022, where he joined just to fix a login popup that was bothering users, then bounced. The author remembers this, uh, event differently than I remember it... George Hotz boldly claimed that he could "fix Twitter search" faster than those lazy Twitter devs, only to bail almost immediately. Hubris! On the way out, he removed that login popup as a sor…

Updated the post to tell that story more accurately. Simultaneously took down the damn blog because Github pages has some freak bug, but oh well.

Time to join GitHub

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#12
post #3

Code is always the best documentation and the best thing about opensource.'

Code will tell you what but not the why. It also doesn’t always tell you the intent.

Good commit logs or comments may tell you why

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#15
post #7
post #3

Code is always the best documentation and the best thing about opensource.'

Having the source lets you fix something for yourself, there are an increasing number of barriers being put up to prevent you submitting a fix upstream. Going through this right now with part of libpng, their mailing list doesn't seem to like my email.

Using a source-based distro (previously Gentoo, now NixOS) lets me solve the problem for myself, even if my PR never gets accepted. Right now the count is at 4 patches in software I use that I submitted upstream that were (for one reason or another) never accepted.

In at least one case, I later found out that I was not the only person to submit a fix for the problem I was running into, but their discussion on the ML also went without comment 3 years earlier.

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#16
post #3

Code is always the best documentation and the best thing about opensource.'

Code will tell you what but not the why. It also doesn’t always tell you the intent.

They should invent a programming language that only compiles if the why is still true.

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#19

It's hilarious to see the old joke actually playing out in real life. Kudos! On a meta note; would you consider adding a left margin to your site? Reading from the very edge of my screen feels somewhat strange.

Clicking through the links in his article, I came across a guy who apparently did the same thing at Apple - he introduced the "auto remove" feature for expired passes added to your wallet, then promptly quit. I had no idea that's how that feature came about, but now I'm going to send a little mental thank you to him every time I get off a plane. That shit was FRUSTRATING.
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